Glamorama

By Joel Stein

As with Ellis' American Psycho, what stabs out at you here--more than the violence, gratuitous sex and endless references to famous people and clothes--is the novel's length. The idea--models so solipsistic that they become terrorists--is a good-enough one for a short story of 15 pages, but it's unsustainable at 482. Ellis' writing can be sharp, though, and after the first inanely repetitive 185 pages, the book succeeds in delivering a creepy sense of dread about our culture. Glamorama's contribution to the world may be the motto of its main character, a male model: The better you look, the more you see. As a sum-up of our decade, it's downright Tom Wolfean.

--By Joel Stein