Way out of control
D. J. Taylor
GLAMORAMA by Bret Easton Ellis Picador, £16.99, pp. 482 here comes a time in the life of any self-respecting thirty-something when the struggle to keep up with young persons' culture gets too exacting to be borne. The revelation that this moment has arrived, despite the long rearguard action to stay in touch (the Q subscription, the vis- its to the Virgin Megastore, the appalled stake-outs in front of Channel Four 'come- dy' programmes), the knowledge that you haven't a clue what people ten years younger than you are on about is infinitely depressing. Nevertheless, it came to me last week when I picked up a copy of Glamora- ma.
Victor Johnson (or maybe Victor Ward — I never did work this one out), Bret Eas- ton Ellis's cretinous (or perhaps merely `ironic' — I had trouble getting a handle on this one as well) protagonist is a 27-year- old New York 'It Boy'. Rather like our own `It Girls', being an It Boy can be defined as having no particular talent but getting your picture in the paper all the time. And I mean all the time. Sweeping round the Big Apple on his Vespa — nice touch that, no idea whether it's authentic — Victor spends large tranches of his waking day searching for news-stand representations of himself.
A busy life to be sure, what with the cat- walk shuffling, the playing in a rock band and the impending opening of a club with the swankiest guest list on the planet. Vic- tor barely has time to court his wasted (did she kick the heroin habit or not?) super- model Chloe Byrne, let alone the various other women he is vaguely pursuing and sort of having sex with. Meanwhile, trouble is looming in the shape of his mafia-con- nected business associate who suspects (rightly) that a) Victor has cuckolded him, and b) that he plans to set up on his own.
`You'd tell me if it looked silly on me wouldn't you?' Worse, sinister black jeeps are trailing him round Manhattan.
Already, by about the tenth page of this engorged and thrumming opus, everything is way, way out of control. It gets no better when, after a rabid 200-page dissection of the New York 'scene', the action heads off to Europe. Here, supposedly being paid to search for an old school classmate (female) by a mysterious Mr PalakOn, Victor finds himself in a weird filmscape world full of incidental maimings and explosions, hard- core sex scenes and a sub-plot that seems to involve his old dad standing for presi- dent. The general effect resembles listening to several different kinds of very loud music issuing simultaneously from half-a- dozen speakers.
This is satire, presumably, in which case two questions need to be asked. Is it still possible, in a clogged and fragmenting world, to write panoramic cultural anatomies of this kind? And if the answer to that is 'yes', how does Bret Easton Ellis shape up? At bottom, Glamorama is simply a modern hipster's directory, a novel in which each restaurant scene is swelled by handfuls of real people, distant music cen- tres are perpetually playing records by real groups, and Victor himself assembles whole sentences out of recycled song lyrics. And while some of the incidental jokes are spot-on cultural fragmentation (disc- jockeys, for example, being referred to as `music designers'), this focus on a core con- stituency that is so hip that most readers will have trouble picking up half the refer- ences inevitably reduces its impact. Never mind the bit where 'Eric Bogosian, Jim Jar- musch, Larry Gagosian, Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, and, oddly enough, Ricki Lake are all having salad' (a prize to any Spectator reader who has heard of more than three of these people — I think Easton Ellis has made two of them up), it would take an exceptionally cool English reader to decode a line of dialogue such as 'Hey, baby, you're looking at me a Hootie and the Blowfish concert. Chill.' (As an exceptionally cool English reader, I can tell you that Hootie and the Blowfish are a US rock band of somewhat middlebrow repu- tation.) Every so often the forbidding veil of nar- rative sophistication lifts a bit and a clunk- ing noise can be heard. 'Hey, all I did was to make the most of my looks,' Victor expostulates at one point. 'What about your mind?' somebody shoots back (that's right, satire). I mean, it's not as if we didn't know the US movie/fashion/pop world was an enormous joke anyway. The distinction between special-effects merchants and proper writers was about 70:30. Glamora- ma will undoubtedly be praised by Mr Will Self, featured on the Late Review, and get its author profiled just everywhere. Me, I finished it feeling rather tired and went downstairs for a nice cup of coffee. As Vic- tor might put it, too many fireworks can be, like, so-oh boring, dude.
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