Stein noted "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." He describes the book's first 185 pages as "inanely repetitive". Entertainment Weekly opines "It's like reading Page Six of the New York Post, but for 482 pages." One reviewer found the opening scenes "funny enough" although noted that it "gets tired easily". Contrarily, the Star Tribune felt "the satiric early half is Ellis in peak form, the thriller-style second half is less successful." In fact, the humour in the novel was praised by multiple critics. The Star Tribune notes Victor's lack of depth, malapropisms, overuse of the word "baby" and the novel's "enchantingly disaffected monotone" of "a been-there-done-that Valleyspeak". Hanson felt that the horror elements in the "labyrinthian" thriller section of the novel seemed "recycled from American Psycho." Entertainment Weekly also state their preference for the "first 189 pages". Contrarily, the New York Times felt that the book was devoid of fun, where even the blackest satire (e.g. Evelyn Waugh's Loved One) are more humorous. EW places Glamorama within an emerging tradition of celebrity satire, noting "the glitterati are the satirical target du jour, what with Woody Allen's limp, oral-sex-filled film Celebrity, and Jay McInerney's clever novel Model Behavior" (both 1998). McInerney (a friend of Ellis) noted the novel's comparative darkness to his own Model Behaviour (also about 90s nightlife and supermodels), published the same year, saying "I deliberately wrote a comic novel because you don't go chasing butterflies with sledgehammers". (Regarding McInerney's novel, Stein had felt that the novelist's attempt at a zeitgeist novel was one "looking at the '90s through an '80s lens".) Harvard Crimson noted, similar to McInerney, that "Celebrity by itself teeters so often into self-parody that it seems too easy to bash it" but remarks that "Fortunately, Ellis does more than that injecting Glamorama with a sharper plot than those of earlier novels, a plot which kicks in about a quarter of the way into the novel." The New York Times question the choice of subject matter as well: "Ellis's satirical message is, essentially, a one-liner, and hardly an original one at that – celebrity culture is vapid, yes, and?" The reviewer furthermore suggested "Glamorama is itself just another artifact of the culture it pretends to criticize." The book's style is summarized by one reviewer as "a book that reads