Let me start by saying that I didn’t care too much for this book. As a provocation and metaphor, yes, it kinda worked. But it just dragged on and on.
However. I happened to mention to a woman friend of mine that I’m gonna start reading Glamorama and she exclaimed: “Oh, tell me how it is. American PSycho is my favourite book of all times!!!”
And it got me thinking. Over the years I’ve heard many women say this. Most of my male, book reading, friends have the same opinion that I have, more or less.
So, from a limited statistical sample, it seems that this is a book appelaing to women.
Female. Didn’t especially like it or dislike it. Certainly not my favorite of all time. If someone told me that I’d have to wonder if they’d ever read anything else.
Female and I thought it was so-so. What I didn’t like most about the book was not the violence, ironically, but how he dragged on and on about nothing. He would talk about slashing a little kid at the zoo or something and then go right to talking about what kinds of shampoos he uses or about Whitney Huston’s first album. The movie was much better.
Forgive the intrusion but this is missing the point is it not? The whole premise is that killing was a (virtually) routine act that he related with specific obsessions about other random things. The movie lost that completely and just became another slasher pic in MHO.
Oh well.
Oh, and by the way, I’m male, loved it - although I wouldn’t say the best of all time it ranks amongst it.
I’m a female and I, too, thought the book was average but the topic was (somewhat) facinating. If I saw Glamorama in a used or discount book store for under seven bucks, I’d consider buying it.
I’ve got to say that this is the first time I’ve ever heard anyone say that the movie was better than the book. I found the book to be much better.
Right, like the way Bateman discusses pan-seared monkfish or whatever in the same tone he talks about cooking and eating one of his victims. Patrick Bateman is, when it comes down to it, a bore. What would make him interesting–being a serial killer–is brought into question at the conclusion of the book and pretty much outright denied in his phone conversation about Paul Denton being spotted in London after Bateman kills him and takes over his apartment.
On film, the book lost a lot of the social satire Ellis put into it and became a slasher-like period piece set in the 1980s. I liked the book quite a lot, although I like Ellis as a writer overall so I may not be the most objective person around. Glamorama, though, I really enjoyed–the most out of any of Ellis’s novels–and I’d love to hear what you think when you’re done, The Gaspode. BTW, Roger Avary, who adapted and directed The Rules of Attraction (which I liked as both book and film), purchased the rights to Glamorama and is currently adapting it for the screen.