grand slam

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat The author of American Psycho shows America what it's really about in his new novel, Glamorama

"The whole point of Super Mario Bros. is that it mirrors life," says Victor Ward, the main character of Bret Easton Ellis' new book Glamorama.

Though the counter-cultural wit of the above line is nothing new in an Ellis novel, Glamorama also has some new tricks. If you have read any of Bret Easton Ellis' previous books -Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho or The Informers - the first difference you will notice about Glamorama is that it has a plot. Innocently staged as a growth process signified by a transition from the first word of the book, "specks," to the last word, "mountain," the plot serves a less essential service to the narrative than its more impressive cohesive service to the accreting snapshots of the main character's life.

Form has always been more important than content to Ellis. Yet through the chapter countdown a thin chain of events connects Victor Ward, a New York model, to the trappings of self-discovery. He moves from a life of "semi-fame" in New York to adventure in Europe, while exposing the tenuous grasp he has on the world outside the fashion pages.

Ultimately, Victor finds himself in a circle of terrorist models, a plot twist that Ellis creates to make a deliberate connection between "the tyranny of beauty in our culture" and "the tyranny of terrorism."

Bret Easton Ellis may be more interested in the bloody loam when it comes to writing about American society, but he seems to say at the same time, so is the press and so are you, the reader. He does so in narrative detail, without making statements more political than "You look like the kind of guy who eats his own scabs."

His work ingrains itself tightly into the American fabric, no matter what stretches of allusions it has to make. From Marilyn Manson to The Simpsons, the book incorporates song titles and media lines in an excruciating litany. In Glamorama it is done to affect a worldliness commensurate to knowing what products to buy based on the redundancy of TV advertisements. And these allusions don't add a meaning to the narrative any deeper than their staggering volume impresses itself on the reader's mind. They contribute to a zeitgeist, a Stimmung that distills the modern context into a feeling that's nearly too much for the senses. Yet sometimes the allusions appear in short blasts, almost starkly suggestive except for the fact that no character is even vaguely interested.

Waverly Spear - our interior designer, and a dead ringer for Parker Posey - sweeps in wearing sunglasses, a clingy catsuit, a wool beret, followed by a hip-hop slut from hell and this dreadfully gorgeous mope-rocker wearing an I AM THE GOD OF FUCK T-shirt.

What critics tend to complain about in a Bret Easton Ellis novel is its emotional vacuousness. Characterizations include yawning and acting, instead of being "jovial" or "hip" or "famous." Novelist Dennis Cooper calls it an "emotional blankness," and it pervades the narrative too. Ellis treats the mundane and consequential with equal weight. Murder is as monumental a human transaction as a haircut. Undercutting his critics with the postulation of emotional blankness itself, Ellis asks, does the world of this novel resemble the world we live in?

Glamorama is innocuous but cram-packed, which makes it the novel of our times. And Bret Easton Ellis once again puts to bed the old myth that a novel has to be especially good in order to be significant.