Roof Beam Reader

Glamorama is a twisted, disgusting, brilliant parody of all that was the early-1990’s. This book is Valley of the Dolls meets Naked Lunch meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets James Bond. Don’t think the combination is possible? Think again. Ellis demonstrates a superb understanding of cultural critique and is creative enough to satirize with seriousness and hilarity simultaneously. If you can get through the first two hundred or so pages of idiotic dialogue (another stroke of narrative brilliance, really, but still hard to wade through), you will be rewarded. Mid-way through the novel, the story takes an unexpected and inexplicable turn. Truly, the twist is never reconciled within the novel and the reader is left feeling literally mind-fucked. No one is who they appear to be, no one works for whom they appear to work (sometimes the characters themselves don’t even realize it). Everyone gets blown up, drugged out, beaten, sodomized, and the smell of feces permeates the latter portion of the story (which takes place in France – coincidence or another cultural critique?). I don’t understand the confetti, I don’t understand the camera crews or the many, many scripts – but am I supposed to? “The better you look, the more you see.”

The Informers is like the sick love-child of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust. While this collection of interweaving short stories is not as shocking or subversive as, say, Glamorama, it is equally blunt in it’s chastisement of Hollywood glitz & glam phoniness (like Holden Caufiled on crack). Ellis’s dystopic vision of Hollywood is a contemporary re-imagining of what West did with Day of the Locust, and of what Bukowski did with Ham on Rye. It’s as honest as John Fante’s Ask the Dust in it’s critique of “west coast envy.” What Ellis does truly brilliantly, I think, is presenting believable (most of the time) characters who truly feel blessed and “happy” to be living in L.A., yet the reader gets a look at what’s going on under the surface, and it is not pretty. The vampires were a stretch, and the child murder was terrifying, but combined and/or inter-mixed with the rest of the more believable shorts – a father trying to reconnect with his son, a mother lusting over young (young) men, a wannabe rockstar abusing his female fans – sexually and physically, well, you get the point that this is L.A. and that the fantasy is fresh, fun, beautiful, but the reality is dark, disturbing, and dangerous. I’m not sure there’s been a more on-the-money satirist since Mark Twain or Jane Austen – if only they had been more free to express themselves.