Bret Easton Ellis's `The Informers' shocks while it criticizes

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by Marty Beard

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The Informers takes the reader back to Los Angeles in the early '80s and plunges into the dreary world of the well-connected, the superich and powerful but worthless. The novel, which begins in 1982 and lasts until 1984, immediately overwhelms you with images of '80s excess, from constantly stoned wealthy college students who all seem to be sleeping with each other to frazzled, Valium-head women who sleep with men young enough to be their sons.

Actually, The Informers is not even a traditional novel but a series of loosely linked vignettes detailing interlocking social circles. Besides other people, Ellis follows two families: the families of William, a foolish father, and his wife, who sleeps with friends of her sons and hangs up the phone on her own cancer-stricken mother, and Les, who encourages his son Tim to pick up women with him. Les, scummily enough, ends up hitting on a girl Tim has met.

Maybe Ellis describes this decadence because he is a closet moralizer and wants to chide society. He knows his subject -- there seem to be many parallels in this novel to his own life. Maybe he's trying to shock his audience into awareness. While he doesn't necessarily condone a decadent, drug-laden lifestyle, he doesn't offer any suggestions to change things, either.

Ellis was born in 1964, just like one of the characters in the novel, which means he came of age in the early '80s -- just like most of his characters. And he, too, grew up in Los Angeles. Ellis is using a culture that he's very familiar with to make a point that is often shockingly drowned in all the blood spilled.

He might be trying too hard to be shocking. But the novel might not have had any impact were it not for the extravagant blood, sex and drug baths. And there's no denying that some of the things that happen in The Informers are absolutely repulsive. This world is populated by every kind of scumbag, even people that are convinced they are vampires and behave as such. The denizens of Ellis' world overdose, wreck their cars, sodomize and rape. This is clearly no City of Angels.

The violence that lurks on these 226 pages with large-ish print is excessive: At least 10 people suffer gruesome deaths. The frightening thing about this novel is that many of the hideous events so matter-of-factly described really happen every day.

Ellis' raw prose exposes the bleakness of the lifestyles of the rich and wasted. Although The Informers has been compared by the Washington Post to Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, he reminds me of a more violent and socially critical Henry Miller. Ellis drops famous names as frequently as Jackie Collins does, in, let's say, one of her dustbin dramas such as Hollywood Wives , only The Infomers is a work with much actual depth. But sometimes only a fine line separates Ellis from pulp fiction.

The shallowness of Ellis' L.A. sucks you in. Take, for example, the series of letters written by 20-year-old Anne to a person named Sean. "The thought of mingling with all these obnoxious suntanned people fills me with dread." But after living in L.A. for six weeks, she says of a new friend, "He thinks I make an incredible blond," and has become a slave to drugs and decadence.

The Informers is certainly not a light and pleasurable read. In fact, much about it depressed me and the luridly employed images of '80s pop contributed to the general cesspool of bleakness.

Ellis is not a writer for the weak of stomach. But it's a worthwhile read if you need a slap in the face or take a voyeuristic pleasure in the sordid lives of American aristocrats.

This item appeared in the Arts & Entertainment section of the September 1, 1995 issue.

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