Title: The Informers (Goodreads)
Author: Bret Easton Ellis
Published: Knopf Doubleday, 1994
Pages: 272
Genres: Literary Fiction
My Copy: Paperback
Buy: Amazon, Book Depository (or visit your local Indie bookstore)
I don’t know why I keep coming back to Bret Easton Ellis; I never seem to overly enjoy his vacuous characters but something keeps drawing me back. The Informers is my forth Ellis book and this one is a collection of short stories that ultimately link together to make an overall story. Think Crash (the movie) but with shallow characters. The Informers follow the lives of several interconnected characters, they all eat at the same places, sleep with the same people and pretty much act like each other.
Each chapter is told from a different character in a first person perspective and in the end each point of view come together to make a very loosely connected story. The characters remind me a lot of Less than Zero but most of the characters in The Informers are supposed to be adults. There are a lot of conversations in this book between different characters and this is the part of the book that Bret Easton Ellis does best. He seems to be able to have a lot of conversations and still drive the plot without adding to much more and the interactions between the people seem to feel very natural.
The book feels shallow and cynical; it tries to spotlight a moral decline of Californian life. Most of Bret Easton Ellis novels feel the same, he is often called a moral satirist but I often feel like he is just a nihilist. But I still feel the need to read his books even if I don’t enjoy them (except for Imperial Bedrooms). Ellis has an interesting style and if I rate his books from worst to best, it looks like he is improving as a writer with age. This might be the fact that his books are more and more metafictional and that seems to help add depth into a book a shallow annoying characters.
I’m a big fan of Ellis. I haven’t read this in many years but it has stuck in my head as being very well done – to be honest I hadn’t read anything even remotely similar to the way this novel is structured before – and serves as a reference point for how to tell many stories about the same thing, or make movies such as Paris J’taime or New York I Love You.
It’s probably not as impressive now I’ve matured as a reader but I still think of if fondly. By the way, did you see the awful movie adaptation? It may have been deliberate but it was all surface and no feeling, major letdown.
I’ve not seen the movie adaptation and I don’t think I will.
I agree with much of what you’ve said here. I adored American Psycho and have been working my way through Ellis’ back catalogue ever since but haven’t really ‘enjoyed’ any of them – but he does what he does very well and all his books have some indescribable quality that keeps me coming back for more. I have read this but can’t distinguish my memory of it from Less Than Zero/The Rules Of Attraction.
Marie
I’ve not read The Rules Of Attraction yet; but I will, for some reason