seen were always hot spots he should have frequented." Characters Victor Ward is the novel's lead character, who had previously appeared as Victor Johnson in The Rules of Attraction (1987). In Glamorama, now an "A-list model, would-be-actor and current "It boy", "an uberstereotype of the male model", Victor lives by his catchphrase mantra "the better you look, the more you see". As Harvard Crimson observes, "His lifestyle is the extreme of everything the current culture worships: he can't avoid thinking in brand names and image and speaks with lines from pop songs." Uncharacteristic for an Ellis protagonist, as the Crimson notes, Victor is "terrified by" the "coldbloodedness" he encounters when he becomes embroiled in international terrorism. As an unintelligent narrator, Victor (through his inability to comprehend his situation), underlines how "the world of celebrity in Glamorama is inescapable". Compared to other Ellis protagonists, Victor is less "sensitive and insightful" than Less than Zero's Clay, neither the "preening psychopath" that is American Psycho's Patrick Bateman", he is nevertheless an "[un]sympathetic protagonist (in his own way, he's as morally bankrupt as ... Patrick Bateman)." As narrator, "Victor's perceptions" sum up "[the glamor world's] disconnection from what the rest of us consider "real life"... [where] Everything he sees is a brand name". CNN speculates when Victor begins speaking to the novel's "film crew" (one of its literary devices), that this could mean that the character is schizophrenic. Victor comes across "oddly homophobic for a member of the pansexual New York fashion scene"; when his gay assistant accuses "I know for a fact you've had sex with guys in the past", he retorts that he did "the whole hip bi thing for about three hours back in college". The mysterious F. Fred Palakon first appears a quarter of the way into the novel, when he offers to pay Victor $300,000 to track down his former Camden classmate Jamie Fields, a double-agent working in the terrorist organisation with which Victor becomes involved. It is never clarified exactly which political organisation Palakon appears to be working for; he even appears alongside Senator Johnson, Victor's father, a United States senator with ambitions to become President. Of Palakon, 'the director' says "We've been through this a hundred times ... There is no Palakon. I've never heard that name. Victor's girlfriend Chloe Byrnes is a supermodel and a recovering drug addict. Alison Poole, the main character from Jay McInerney's