Book Review : Bret Easton Ellis - The Informers (1994)
There are two ways you can follow a novel as controversial and iconic as Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho. You can either try to do the exact same thing or do something no one would ever expect you to do. Ellis did neither after American Psycho. He just resumed telling the stories the wealthy and morally hollow Californian elite that always fascinated him. It's what he does in The Informers and it is, for better or worse, a generational talent doing what he does best without necessarily trying to outdo himself.
The Informers isn't exactly a novel, but it isn't short a short story collection either. It's somewhat of an uncomfortable in-between where every chapter tells a story from a character who was introduced from a previous chapter or who's going to get discussed further on. It features the same bored, arrogant Californians Bret Easton Ellis loves to torment, who always find new and exciting ways to ruin their lives. A central tenet of Ellis' writing is: if you have everything, the only thing left for you is to lose it all.
Bret Easton Ellis and the Death of Honest Living
So, let's treat The Informers like a short story collection because it doesn't have much of an overarching story. Not that Bret Easton Ellis' novels have deep and intricate plots, but all these chapters stand out on their own. The first one that caught my attention is called At the Still Point, where five young entitled jerks commemorate the one year anniversary of their friend Jamie's death. Four of them don't look like they're feeling anything precise in regards the anniversary except the still bereaved Raymond.
As kids who always had their every need fulfilled, they're embarrassed by Raymond's loss and longing. Even worse, when Raymond retreats to the bathroom to cry, they claim Jamie never even liked him. They're so drugged up and jaded by their opulence, they're incapable of acknowledging any earnest emotion. It's one of these stories where many readers would complain that "nothing happens", but it's exactly the point of it. It's too late for everyone. They're either dead or dying in metaphorical ways.
In the Islands tells the story of Tim (who’s in At the Still Point)'s weekend getaway with his father Les in Hawaii, where their relationship gets heated over a girl named Rachel. Les wonders why his son is hostile and secretive with him, but can’t realize the absence of gap between their behaviours. That he is like a kid himself and that's it’s bugging Tim that he has to deal with his dad’s weirdo behaviour. It’s such a heartbreaking story about how family and intimacy don’t really ever solve anything.
In Discovering Japan, Ellis shares a playful look at the rock star myth by introducing us to Bryan Metro, a living and breathing monster who's been spoonfed all the indulgences in the world for way too long. Letters from L.A I believe features Sean (or the absence of Sean) from The Rules of Attraction as the recipient of the letter from a young woman named Anne and highlight a different kind of solitude. One where a young person earnestly experiencing life in L.A can’t find an echo for what she does.
The Logical End of a Life of Nothingness
If you've kept reading this review until now, I'm quite certain there's a lingering question in your mind: is The Informers just a series of interrelated short stories about rich and emotionally disconnected people? Not quite. It's a little more complicated than that. Starting with The Secret of Summer, the stories of The Informers take a weird turn to what is the only logical end to a living a life of opulent nothingness: self-destruction. These rich people are on bullet train to the cemetery, which both feels cathartic and inevitable.
In The Secret of Summer we meet the aforementioned Jamie who is very fucking dead in At the Still Point. Jamie lives a very silly lifestyle, where he believe's he's a vampire and murders people. It’s a break in tone from the previous stories, but it also feels inevitable that a young, privileged prick would choose to seek excitement in something as surreal and weird as murder and vampire role play. Ellis leaves no doubt as to whether they are vampires or not. These are still snobby kids cosplaying.
The connection to reality of the stories in The Informers starts wavering from that point, but it's by design. It was thin to begin with, but it veers into the highly metaphorical with On The Beach and becomes surreal against in At the Zoo with Bruce, which highlights a dark, but important theme in The Informers : a certain social class will only feel alive if they can take things away from others and threaten to take the only thing they’re now allowed to by law: their sense of security.
*
I highly dislike people like Bret Easton Ellis in real life. Neurotic, privileged people who have no use for anything, except other neurotic, privileged people that remind them how neurotic and privileged they are. But that's exactly the thing : I believe Bret Easton Ellis hates these people too and he loves to make fun of them in his writing. The Informers doesn't reinvent the wheel of what he does, but it's taking his portrayal of the failure of the American Dream one step further, making it therefore a mandatory stop.
