A Fashionista With a Killer Sense of Style

GLAMORAMA by Bret Easton Ellis; Alfred A. Knopf $25, 482 pages

“You make a mistake if you see what we do as merely political.” Hitler’s caveat serves as one of the epigrams introducing Bret Easton Ellis’ latest novel, “Glamorama,” and you make a mistake if you see “Glamorama” as merely the “Mein Kampf” of the fashion industry. After all, the second quote is by Krishna.

“Glamorama’s” hero, Victor, is a 27-year-old semi-famous MTA (Model-Turned-Actor), incapable of uttering a sincere thought or an original word. His sentences are designer-initialed portmanteaus of rock lyrics and ad scripts. His ambition is to land a role in “Flatliners II.” His greatest disappointment was a rejection from MTV’s “The Real World.” He lives so much in the present that he can barely remember where he was the day before, and the names and faces of college girlfriends have been zapped from his data bank. His singular talent, to the amazement of his friends, is the ability to memorize the lengths of pop songs.

Victor’s cachet rests on his relationship with supermodel Chloe Byrnes, which has brought him to the reflected brink of success. The first 185 pages of “Glamorama” chronicle the buildup to the opening of a new club, designed and celeb-ed by Victor. And, indeed, you make a mistake--a mistake Ellis wants you to make--if you see “Glamorama” as merely a model book, a Jay McInerney retread, covering the tired ground of velvet ropes and maple runways.

Victor’s feckless use of sex leads to his expected downfall. But vapidity has its value. As his New York world collapses around him, Victor accepts an assignment from the mysterious F. Fred Palakon to sail aboard the QE2 to England and retrieve a young woman named Jamie Fields--like many of the women in the novel, a former flame of Victor’s from Camden College. Jamie, like all beautiful people, is not hard to find, and Victor, like all men, is not hard for her to bed.

One climax leads to another, and, quicker than you can say “Patty Hearst,” Victor is compromised and enlisted in Jamie’s cadre of Models-Turned-Terrorists. And quicker than you can say “Martin Cruz Smith,” “Glamorama” is reinvented as a splatter-porn thriller, with a sperm and body count in the googols. As Victor pokes his dazed way from London to Paris, like an updated Sally Bowles in “I Am a Digital Camera,” he and his model-chums are followed by a film crew (Victor’s finally made “The Real World”) that records their soapy couplings and betrayals. Yet there seems to be another crew, dressed in armor rather than Gap, to capture their preparations as the well-coiffed cadre blows up the Paris Metro and the Cafe Flore with bombs secreted in Prada backpacks. And behind the scenes--a post-production detail to enhance or erase history.

Nothing, least of all “Glamorama” itself, is what it seems. Victor’s Paris is a city that the members of the club from the Argentine expat Julio Cortazar’s “Hopscotch” might recognize if they were still alive, and Ellis describes it with the iris for detail of the French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet. And, as with Robbe-Grillet, you would make a mistake if you thought “Glamorama” was merely plot-ical. Ellis borrows his plots like Harry Winston tiaras, and shoots his scripts with lenses from the cameras of Truffaut, Godard and Patrick McGoohan’s “The Prisoner.”

What Ellis does with cunning and brilliance and style is to dress his models in language that is terminally hip yet vitally comprehensible. Victor fills his CD rack with ‘90s phenoms like Machines of Loving Grace and Teenage Fanclub, but his speech is peppered with the lyrics of bands that were dead before he was born. The Who, Serge Gainsbourg (whose “Je t’aime” fertilized half of Europe) and the Doors provide the soundtrack to Victor’s mission, serving as Rosetta stones for older readers whose disposable income goes toward Ivory Towers rather than Tower Records.

Because, ultimately, “Glamorama” is a serious book the way the Mondrian, say, is a serious hotel. It may look like a Sky Bar, where the glam kids hang out. But finally it’s the balding, double-breasted readers looking on from the pool who are picking up the tab.

“The better you look,” as Victor says, “the more you see.”