The Informers
In this seductive and chillingly nihilistic novel, Bret Easton Ellis, the author of American Psycho, returns to Los Angeles, the city whose moral badlands he portrayed unforgettably in Less Than Zero. The time is the early eighties. The characters go to the same schools and eat at the same restaurants. Their voices enfold us as seamlessly as those of DJs heard over a car radio. They have sex with the same boys and girls and buy from the same dealers. In short, they are connected in the only way people can be in that city. Dirk sees his best friend killed in a desert car wreck, then rifles through his pockets for a last joint before the ambulance comes. Cheryl, a wannabe newscaster, chides her future stepdaughter, "You're tan but you don't look happy." Jamie is a clubland carnivore with a taste for human blood. As rendered by Ellis, their interactions compose a chilling, fascinating, and outrageous descent into the abyss beneath L.A.'s gorgeous surfaces.
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From the Back Cover:
"Bret Easton Ellis is a very, very good writer [and] American Psycho is a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel...Written out of the American tradition -- the novelist's function is to keep a running tag on the progress of the culture; and he's done it brilliantly...A seminal book."
From the Inside Flap:
-- Fay Weldon, Washington Post
"What's rarely said in all the furor over this novel is that it's a satire, a hilarious, repulsive, boring, seductive, deadpan satire...Ellis is, first and last, a moralist. Under cover of his laconic voice, every word in his three novels to date springs from grieving outrage at our spiritual condition... Ambition alone sets it apart from most contemporary fiction. Prudes, squares and feminist commissars aside, the rest of us should applaud Brat Easton Ellis for setting out in this noble and dangerous direction."
-- Henry Bean, front page, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"A masterful satire and a ferocious, hilarious ambitious, inspiring piece of writing, which has large elements of Jane Austen at her vitriolic best. An important book."
-- Katherine Dunn
"A great novel. What Emerson said about genius, that it's the return of one's rejected thoughts with an alienated majesty, holds true for American Psycho...There is a fever to the life of this book that is, in my reading, unknown in American literature."
-- Michael Tolkin
"The first novel to come along in years that takes on deep and Dostoyevskian themes...[Ellis] is showing older authors where the hands have come to on the clock...He has forced us to look at intolerable material, and so few novels try for that anymore."
-- Norman Mailer, Vanity Fair
The City Is Los Angeles, in the very recent past. The birthplace and graveyard of American myths and dreams, it harbors a group of people trapped between the sybaritic beauty of their surroundings and their own damning moral impoverishment. The Informers is a chronicle of their voices -- fused into an intense, impressionistic narrative that spans and blurs genders, generations and even identities -- all of them suffering from nothing less than the death of the soul.
Each of the characters in this extraordinary book describes connections between people (classmates and best friends, sometimes dead; a decrepit rock star and his retinue; estranged or ex-husbands and wives, as well as their current, often improbable partners; sex dates and vampires) who remain in every important way strangers. A father inveigles his distant son into a holiday jaunt to Hawaii ... a car crashes in the desert, a plane goes down in the mountains ... a girl returns home to her future by cross-country train, while another spends her final days on the beach ... a couple visits the zoo, for the last time or not. In telling these stories, they escape or condemn or resign themselves, knowing that the bright veneer of their lives, blinding as sunshine, is not enough to help them; knowing also that they have little else to justify their presence in the world.
Bret Easton Ellis writes with absolute clarity and great depth of feeling about the struggle to find coherence in an environment that might well have lost it entirely. Savagely funny, poignant and uncompromising, The Informers unmasks both a city and an age.
Each of the characters in this extraordinary book describes connections between people (classmates and best friends, sometimes dead; a decrepit rock star and his retinue; estranged or ex-husbands and wives, as well as their current, often improbable partners; sex dates and vampires) who remain in every important way strangers. A father inveigles his distant son into a holiday jaunt to Hawaii ... a car crashes in the desert, a plane goes down in the mountains ... a girl returns home to her future by cross-country train, while another spends her final days on the beach ... a couple visits the zoo, for the last time or not. In telling these stories, they escape or condemn or resign themselves, knowing that the bright veneer of their lives, blinding as sunshine, is not enough to help them; knowing also that they have little else to justify their presence in the world.
Bret Easton Ellis writes with absolute clarity and great depth of feeling about the struggle to find coherence in an environment that might well have lost it entirely. Savagely funny, poignant and uncompromising, The Informers unmasks both a city and an age.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherBrilliance Audio
- Publication date2009
- ISBN 10 1423395859
- ISBN 13 9781423395850
- BindingMP3 CD
- Rating
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