Too long with the glitterati

While he was researching this novel, Nicholas Blincoe apparently "spent a lot of time blagging his way backstage at fashion shows", as the press release tells us.

If White Mice is to be believed, then there must be few more alarming places to find oneself. Out on the catwalk, the models look immaculate, but behind the scenes it is a very different story. The same seemingly glamorous figures are more likely to be overdosing in the loos, or gorging on an endless stream of cigarettes, cosmetics and champagne as a frenzied entourage of dressers, stylists and PR people attempt to keep the show on the road.

This is the chaotic scenario that greets Jamie, the 20-year-old narrator of the book, when he goes to Paris to catch up with his sister, an international model for the Italian designer Gianni Osano. She is the epitome of cool in his eyes, and his entrée to the glittering circuit of celebrity parties and shows. Initially starstruck in the opening chapters, he begins to realise that things for Louise aren't going as smoothly as he thought.

It soon transpires that she has been dropped by her agency in New York, while her current boss Osano hasn't really been in vogue since the Seventies.

With a huge supporting cast of fashion-world characters, Blincoe stitches together a plot which takes Jamie and his sister on from Paris to Geneva, eventually reaching Milan for Fashion Week, where he works as an assistant to Osano. Along the way, the main players prop up their delicate egos and careers by double-crossing each other in increasingly devious ways.

About halfway, the tone shifts up a gear as the narrative switches modes, from farcical satire to noirish, taboo-breaking thriller. Jamie and his sister begin to do things that will make many readers squirm.

White Mice does adhere to some of the New Puritan literary rules that Blincoe laid down in 2000 with co-editor Matt Thorne.

These favoured straightforward storytelling over "poetic" writing, and demanded that stories should be set in the present day, with "real" references to "products, places, artists and objects". This novel, then, is written entirely in the present tense, in the kind of breathless prose usually reserved by journalists for celebrity interviews. Inevitably, this grates over the length of a whole book. More unfortunately, it gives the supposedly upto-the-minute story a curiously dated feel. It's rather like reading last year's newspapers.

There is also the compulsory blizzard of contemporary references and brand-names. After all, Blincoe implies, the fashion world, is all about whose names you drop, and which celebrities come to your show.

Perhaps the acknowledgements at the end of the book are the most telling of all.

Apart from the roll-call of Donatella Versace, Dolce & Gabbana, Helmut Lang, et al, Blincoe also thanks - "for their witting or unwitting inspiration" - philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Immanuel Kant. No mention of Brett Easton Ellis, though, whose novel Glamorama this slightly overcooked caper more often resembles. Looks like all that time with the glitterati must have gone to Blincoe's head.