Ellis's Island.

Glamorama, by Bret Easton Ellis (Knopf, 482 pp., $25)

The scene is the Cafeteria restaurant in Chelsea. The waitresses wear uniforms by Dolce & Gabbana. Welcome to Bret Easton Ellis country. The time is lunch, and my girlfriend is explaining how she dislikes the author's 1991 bestselling novel, American Psycho.

"He's the psycho," she declares over her mesclun green salad with cilantro and oyster mushrooms. "He has to be sick. And a narcissist. Anyone who writes about violence the way he does-I'd walk the other way if I saw him. And what's his obsession with designer labels? It's so self-serving."

"But babe, you couldn't put the book down."

"Well, yeah. Doesn't mean I like him."

Pull back to crowded restaurant. These are Ellis's people: young, successful, stylish, urban, confident. The cheek-kissers and the club- hoppers. These people know people-certainly more people than you do. I mean, look at your shoes. Your haircut. Your jeans. Your gut. Try getting in somewhere with that on.

Ellis revels in these people, even as his characters go from club-hopping to murder. His new novel, Glamorama, echoes American Psycho, with psychotic investment banker Pat Bateman replaced by fashion model Victor Ward. Victor wears Prada, rides a Vespa, and manages a New York dance club on his way to becoming the new "It Boy." He talks in soundbites, quotes song lyrics, even dates supermodels when not snorting heroin and acting the enfant terrible. Then, inexplicably, he joins a European terrorist syndicate and bombs a trans-Atlantic 747.

The plot is nihilistic; the characters, depraved. And page after page is filled with horrible, graphic violence. So why do I get the feeling Ellis is a closet conservative?

The question is, do we take Glamorama at face value or as satire? Ellis writes like a celebrity-crazed gossip columnist, coating Victor's trendy life in a patina of beautiful friends, carefree spending, sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. It's a world straight out of Vogue and MTV, and to emphasize the point Ellis incorporates the names of real people and products into his fiction. Listen to this name-drop from a Glamorama fashion show: "I'm able to spot Anna Wintour, Carrie Donovan, Holly Brubach, Catherine Deneuve, Faye Dunaway, Barry Diller, David Geffen, Ian Schrager, Peter Gallagher, Wim Wenders, Andre Leon Talley, Brad Pitt, Polly Mellon, Kal Ruttenstein, Katia Sassoon, Carrie Otis, RuPaul, Fran Lebowitz, Winona Ryder (who doesn't applaud as we walk by), . . ."

Ellis has these beautiful people doing some downright ugly things. He explained the brutality of Glamorama this way in a recent interview: "The connection between the fashion world and terrorism came from an abstract idea about the tyranny of beauty going on in the culture-how uneasy it makes everybody, how it makes everybody insecure about the way they look. Connect that with the insecurity of what terrorists do." Okay, but listen to this passage from his book, part of a three-page description of a downed 747: ". . . the smell of rot is everywhere-coming off dismembered feet and arms and legs and torsos propped upright, off piles of intestines and crushed skulls, and the heads that are intact have screams etched across their faces." Now did the tyranny of beauty ever make you feel that uneasy?

Cut back to table at Cafeteria. I show my girlfriend a folded copy of the New York Times's review. The piece called Glamorama "sloppily contrived . . . [with a] grisly taste for death and mutilation." She nods with approval and returns to picking at my plate of buffalo mozzarella. But I'm unsure.

I think back to Ellis's Rules of Attraction, his best novel and the only one in which violence doesn't play a major role. Its quiet and chaste account of wayward liberal-arts students has become a cult classic of the college generation-though it's in fact a subtle indictment of liberal college culture. The drunken hookups, the drugs, the social dysfunction, the loneliness of his characters scream, Look what's happened to us.

So maybe we should take Ellis at his word. Perhaps the graphic brutality of Glamorama really is there to puncture the cult of the celebrity. After all, the people committing the murders and blowing up the planes are uniformly rich, beautiful, and cool. The same people who wear liberal politics like a Patek Philippe watch. Notice this bit of dialogue as Victor, our narrator, debates how to promote his nightclub:

"I think people are wondering why we don't have a whatchamacallit," Peyton says. Then after much finger snapping, "Oh yeah, a cause!" . . .

"Victor, shouldn't we have a cause?" JD says. "What about global warming or the Amazon? Something. Anything."

"Passe. Passe. Passe." I stop.

"Wait-Beau! Is Suzanne DePasse coming?"

"What about AIDS?"

"Passe. Passe."

"Breast cancer?"

"Oh groovy, far out," I gasp before slapping him lightly on the face. "Get serious. . . ."

Glamorama is a devilishly heterodox novel. Yes, maybe even a conservative novel-though one so steeped in liberal pop culture that it's easy to miss the point. What does it mean to be conservative, anyway? Well, in part, it means . . . making fun of liberal chic, right?

Closing shot. We pay our Cafeteria bill and look around, checking to see if anyone we know has come in. I fold up the Times review and slip it in my pocket. We exit onto 17th and Seventh. I hail a crosstown cab. My girlfriend steps off the curb: "He's still a jerk."