MEET Victor; good looking, vain, disloyal, utterly vacuous, and stupid enough to think the PLO are a Seventies pop group. Not that he is without a sense of humour. When asked why he is so dense, he replies: "I don't know baby. It's some kind of gene displacment." Loosely committed to a super model girlfriend, he also models and is having an aggressive affair with a woman he doesn't seem to like, and makes sure he sleeps with anyone else who happens along. He inhabits a world of frantically impersonal recreational sex where the random exchanges passing for conversation revolve around designer labels, famous names, drugs and "hey, was that you at that party last night?" It is a place where a fading tan amounts to a crisis of identity.
Welcome to Glamorama (Picador, £16 in UK), the fourth novel from Bret Easton Ellis and his first since the viciously casual American Psycho shocked publishers and readers in 1991.
Be warned. This is a big novel, heading towards five hundred pages, and readers wanting beautiful prose, three-dimensional characterisation and architectural plotting should look elsewhere. The justification for its length lies in its chronicling of a recognisably sick society. None of the players evokes our sympathy and the pleasures of the glistening, shiny surfaces which dominate the book tend to pall quickly. It is too long, but has that random, episodic quality and deadpan, deliberately neutral style which are Ellis's hallmarks. Reading him is like becoming a voyeur for a day.
Plot has never mattered to his work, and until about halfway through Glamorama it is disengaged observation typical of Ellis, as his standard cast of spoilt rich kids turned twentysomething - designer clones, models and almost-actors - move from party to drugs to sexual workouts and on to the next wine bar. Almost by accident the reader becomes aware that what was a social satire taking beauty as its thesis, has become a hectic, moralistic thriller in which the potential evil of surreal physical perfection is explored in a chaotic study of depravity. Juxtaposing the banal and the tragic has always amused Ellis. Early in the novel, a character reports that a friend has just returned from climbing Everest. "There were two deaths. She lost her cell phone." So calculated is Ellis's depiction of superficiality that it begins to strike the reader as being deeper than it appears. Suddenly it becomes clear that Ellis is operating at a higher technical level than he is usually credited with the capacity to reach. Set in Manhattan, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Milan, the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and most of all in what passes for Victor's consciousness, Glamorama is so shallow it is dense. Gradually it emerges that nervy, aspiring Victor, while busily intent on inventing himself, is frightened of being found out.
Ellis the writer belongs to a particular social milieu. His of-the-moment fiction has surface similarities with that of Jay McInerney, particularly with McInerney's most recent novel, Model Behaviour, published last year. Both deal in designer labels and the dropping of famous names. It may sound laughable, but this fiction can claim a part in what will eventually become the social history of a specific period. Real-life actors and supermodels wander about off-stage, leaving their invented counterparts to star. Ellis's society, though, is sicker and blacker than any real world. For all the pseudo sophistication, many of his characters are little more than primitive savages, and their savagery, which includes murder and dismemberment, invariably provides the cue for Ellis's flat, efficient prose to shift gear, demonstrating vividly descriptive resources which are carefully kept under wraps until it is time for one of his more lurid sequences.
While Glamorama starts out as a late-twentysomething update of Less Than Zero (1985) and The Rules of Attraction (1987), it develops into the story of a man who, while on the run from himself, slowly becomes aware of feelings of unease which eventually turn to terror. Victor, who featured briefly in The Rules of At- traction as an unfaithful boy friend, is our narrator - aspiring and quasi-famous if only by virtue of his relationship with a supermodel. He is busily disengaging himself from his past and particularly his obviously rich and powerful father. In a rare moment of frankness he confesses: "I'm sick of being friendly with like people who either hate me or are planning to kill me or . . ."
Then Victor experiences a new sensation: he is approached by a serious-looking man who despatches him on a mission to find a missing girl. The search is on and in this age of super-fast airline travel, Victor is sent to Europe on an ocean liner. On the liner an aura of fantasy begins to emerge. Ellis's characters take drugs with the ease the rest of us breathe, so it seems natural to assign some of the inconsistencies and mistaken identities to hallucinogens. Victor is increasingly reminded of conversations he never had, favours he didn't do and appears in photographs with people he never met. Ellis sustains the chaos with a technical control which his previous novels didn't display - they didn't need to. This control, however, does not conceal the fact that Glamorama is in fact two novels somewhat unevenly joined at the hip. It is also true that both novels read as if part of a marathon, offbeat, heavily improvised screenplay.
In London he falls in with a group of supermodels with a flair for inventive international terrorism, who are depraved well beyond anything poor Victor ever imagined. Ellis slickly returns to the grotesque excesses of American Psycho. And this time there is no doubt that the madness is real. Victor, for all his faults, is the most complete of Ellis's characters and is at least more human than the crazed Bateman of American Psycho. Readers of that novel will be prepared for the staggering atrocities of Glamorama. Sex, violence and amorality have a field day in this deadpan extravaganza which is frequently dragged back to reality by Ellis's ear for dialogue and his well-developed saving sense of the absurd.
