"The Informers" by Bret Easton Ellis presents a collection of interconnected stories set in the dark underbelly of Los Angeles. While some narratives captivated me with their raw portrayal of hedonism and disillusionment, particularly stories 3, 4, 7, and 10, the overall collection left me wanting more depth and cohesion. Ellis excels at crafting vivid scenes and flawed characters, yet at times, the stories felt disjointed, lacking a unifying theme or narrative thread. While it offers glimpses into the morally bankrupt lives of its characters, "The Informers" falls short of delivering a truly immersive and satisfying reading experience.

Amerikan Psykolla (1991) maailmanmaineeseen noussut Bret Easton Ellis jatkaa Paljastajissa, 1994 (The Informers, 1994) jo hieman liiankin tutuksi käyneellä lempiaiheellaan eli 80-luvun losangelesilaisen hedonismin, nihilismin, juppismin, pinnallisuuden, sieluttomuuden, moraalittomuuden, ylettömän päihteiden käytön ja vieraantuneisuuden kuvauksella. Romaani käsittää 13 lukua, joissa kussakin on oma minä-kertojansa. Luvut linkittyvät jollain tasolla toisiinsa, mutta sen verran heikosti, että lopputulos jää kauaksi eheästä kokonaisuudesta. Enemmänkin kyse lienee Elliksen tajunnanvirrasta. Ellismäiseen tyyliin romaanin loppupuolella tarinantynkää lähdetään vetämään täysin ennalta-arvaamattomaan suuntaan, mutta sekin ajatus jää puolitiehen ja sitä myötä täysin irralliseksi langanpätkäksi.

Sekavan alun jälkeen Paljastajat löytää tiettyä imua joksikin aikaa, mutta mosaiikin hajanaisuus ja tarinallisesti päämäärätön irrallisten kohtausten suolto syö loppua kohti pohjan tältä. Siinä missä Lunar Park (2005) hätkähdytti, yllätti ja sai raapimaan päätä, tämä romaani jää lähinnä päämäärättömäksi sekoiluksi.

Arvioni 2,3 tähteä viidestä.

Ah Bret, I loved you so, so long ago. For anyone who has not had the mixture of pleasure, horror, disgust and loathing which is generated by the reading of American Psycho, then you should probably start here to ease your way into the dismissive, violent and destructive world which Ellis describes. I read American Psycho in one long teenage school day (under desks during class/ behind a wall at break/ on the bus home) and was amazed that this man was actually a fully functioning author and not a psychopathic murderer who, I would happily have believed, penned his most famous of novels from the constraints of a padded room by narrating his tale into a dictophone after he was deemed too dangerous to be given a pen.

To compare The Informers to American Psycho is like comparing a watered down lemon cordial to a shot of rocket fuel. The comparison is largely meaningless because American Psycho is so far off the scale of brilliant wrongness that there is no scale capable of measuring it accurately. The brutality, drug taking, narcisism and general self-absorbed-bastarditis exhibited in The Informers is not in the same category but it is still present and grubby. You won't like any of the people who inhabit these pages but that's ok ... maybe they are there to be despised so we can all feel better about ourselves.

Thanks Bret, I feel like a paragon of crystalline virtue now.

Joe woke up and ordered a cheese omelet only to stare at it the entire time, confused about why he ordered it in the first place when he wasn't hungry, then he went to the movies but he didn't really pay attention to the first half of it, then this goth girl was looking at him funny and he really wanted to fuck her but doesn't, and he decided to visit a friend's house and so he drove there in his super expensive sports car and drank beer and afterward he went to a club and picked up a valley girl with whom he snorted coke with and then had sex with, and in the morning he woke up with a big hangover and so he drank some juice.

Wasn't that a really annoying run-on sentence? Unfortunately this book is chock-full of them. I kept hoping that the minutia of the characters' lives will somehow lead to or add up to a scathing commentary about society or the way some people live, but sadly, it does not. Ultimately, I felt like I was just following the Twitter accounts of several rich Southern Californians leading lives of debauchery. What a big disappointment.

Less a novel and more a collection of extremely loosely connected short stories set in L.A. The movie based from the book is pretty terrible, but from watching that it makes certain aspects of the connectivity between characters more easy to see and understand, especially in comparison to my first attempt reading it years ago. Glad I gave it the re-read, I've always enjoyed Ellis yet this was the only one of his i felt I didn't really 'get'. Happy to see my understanding has changed.

This story lacks subject. It doesn't have any kind of meaning. Vampires pop up and make racist jokes and have sex, then kill their sex partners. Guys and girls who are all uniformly rich, drug-addicted, bird-brained, big fans of sunglasses, blond, tanned, gorgeous shuffle around doing nothing, perhaps to portray the meaninglessness of life. The plot is horrible. To be honest, it doesn't seem to really have a plot. It's really more a series of horrible short stories connected only by the chracters that are mentioned. It has sex, drug, money, and nothing more. Throughout the book, none of the characters think about or do anything other than have sex, do drugs, and engage in violent activities. I've never seen a more pretentious, shoddy, and badly written book than this.

(amended and expanded with a footnote - July 2024).

There is, I think, a great advantage to reading books/authors long after the controversy they attracted has died or been forgotten, as I approach them purely as books. I am so out of touch that it was only reading the novel that I realised it had been made into a film which I had seen and rather liked and enjoyed (please see footnote *1 below). I think this book is brilliant. I am not going to bother repeating the list of adjectives that are always trotted out to describe Ellis's writing, all I will say is that his writing reads true. My only reservation is to wonder if his writing, for all its excellence, does not depend too much on the transient minutes of 1980s songs, bands, fashions, etc. I am old enough for obscure British bands to come back with an almost Proustian resonance because they recall youth. How the book will wear, or how it reads for a younger generation I can't say. But Ellis's is an important and excellent writer. I regard him amongst the writers I would strongly recommend.

*1 I realise my liking of the film puts me in a minority but then I saw it years after it came out. If you think there is a pattern in seeing films and reading books years after they were published you are probably right. I won't indulge in too much biographical history but about thirty years ago I gave up caring what was supposedly fashionable, important, relevant or 'in' or 'the' thing of the moment and just buried myself in living disgracefully.

I'm not sure this was an actual novel, it's more like a bunch of short stories with a lot of plot and character overlap, which is weird in a way, because I was expecting short stories straight but then there's this inward spiraling that only exacerbates the fact that it's often hard to tell who's who exactly, though through no fault of the reader, it's mostly the characters who are too disoriented to have clear ideas of who they are. Anyway, we know it's not East Coast but L.A. and environs, and there's a seemingly homogenous tribe of uniformly bored and dull yuppies who are all about 20 and look a few years less, lounging around 1980s on a variety of abused prescription meds and coke and whatever, and they smoke a lot of pot, visit each other's poolsides and parties and photo shoots and other exclusive social events, and deal drugs and suck cock for drugs and tape videos compulsively and generally act like nihilistic brats with expensive habits and absurdly shallow relationships.
It's all really hilarious actually: these are like the most gruesome parody of privileged white (blond, buff, rich, racist etc) kids entirely disfunctional, drugged out of their minds and generally clueless. That is, it would be hilarious, with all the disinterested luxury and excess, if it wasn't for all the sadistic passive agression or downright slasher violence nonchalantly juxtaposed in carefully measured doses, from coffee spoon to swimming pool. The compartmentalization of characters and narratives gives scope to a nuanced spectrum of mindstates, from deranged braindeath to almost relatable, from self-victimizing to horroristic monstrosity. The Informers reads like a kind of satirical freakshow, a modern-day hypebolic rag of courtly scandals and high (huhhuh) society misdemeanors, sometimes outlandish beyond incredulity, but generally too peppered with delicious details to rule out as possibly a thing. Vicarious, brutal, high-budget, cliché'd and quirky, riddled with black humor to the extreme: I found myself embarrasingly entertained.

We all know it.

They are out there, the hip ones, the rich ones, the drug addicts and the perverts.
The young and not so young well tanned on high doses of alcohol and prescription and def. non-prescription drugs are just soooo bored - and boring.

Nevertheless, once again Bret Easton Ellis feels a calling to describe them all in detail.

Whereas American Psycho was a wake-up call, pointing at the utter restlessness of a twisted brain leading to - for lack of better words - nihilistic behavior in extremis, The Informers is nothing but a "Let me see if I can drive this one to the bank".

2 stars for the ability to put together full sentences.

"Because I'm a tan, burly motherfucker and my teeth are so sharp they make a straight razor seem like a butter knife."

Empty people without aim or ambition. Ellis' literary voice is unmistakable, resonating just as powerfully in this collection of loosely connected short stories as it does in his full-length novels.

A Pokol, Breat Easton Ellis univerzumában: Los Angeles. Valiumtól kába bukott angyalok korzóznak a pálmafák alatt, üres szemű, napbarnított szőkéket invitálnak egy italra, a hőségben remeg a levegő, a Porsche motorja agresszíven beböffen, és mindenki előre unja már az egészet, a beszélgetést, ami a dugás előtt van, a dugás utáni csendet, sőt, a dugást magát. Itt a szenvedés rafinált: kapsz végtelen sok pénzt, csak azon kapod magad, hogy nem tudsz mit kezdeni vele. Olyan ez, mint valami késő XX. századi Tantalusz-parafrázis, ahol eszközeid vannak egy jobb életre, csak kedved nincs, hogy élj velük.

(Megjegyzem, akkor szembesültem azzal, hogy Ellis micsoda pazar író, amikor olvasás közben elfelejtettem, hogy ez a szöveg voltaképpen irodalom, amit "csak" egy író írt. El tudja hitetni, hogy ezt a mérgező, szörnyű világot nem teremtette, hanem csak közvetíti. Kellemetlen, néha fájdalmas olvasni, minden porcikám tiltakozik, hogy akár csak közelítőleg valóságnak fogadjam el ezt a teret, de tekintve, hogy ez a vélelmezhető írói célnak tökéletesen megfelel, csak ámulni tudok Ellis képességein.)

giving this two stars purely because he had the audacity to publish this. the exploration of soulless LA gets old about 4 chapters in, and i felt disconnected from the novel the whole time. it was genuinely a set of loosely connected short stories that feature a new character doing lines and being a general sleaze. and why does every character have a Porsche? boo.