just read and finished bret easton ellis’ the informers, and it’s an interesting book when it’s not soporific. it’s definitely not a fantastic book - the writing is sloppy at parts, the literary elements not woven intricately enough, but there’s a few interesting things here and there that are worth commenting on.
the informers is fundamentally fascinated by what we call the economies of excess and luxury. it’s obsessed with obsession, with reflections and symbols and luxury. the characters that populate the book, when they do surface for awareness, are mirages within this rich landscape. the choosing of los angeles – the city of glitz and glamour, is so overt for its associations to vacuity and shallowness that it is probably the first thing that stands out when you read it.
what ellis does, and sometimes does admirably, is juxtapose the economies of luxury against the transactions of the inner soul. there is a price to pay, he implicitly argues, for buying into the lifestyle of the decadent and artificial. perhaps one loses the ability to form meaningful connections - as most people begin existing in a state of self-obsession, pleasure the only numbed goal of the mind. connections that form are so tenuous, so devoid of emotional rapport, that they fracture as easily as they are built. he does this best of course, in the stories that show the descent from a full-bodied soul to an emaciated and starved person: “letter’s from l.a” and “the fifth wheel” come to mind. the former because it shows the gradation and erosion of anne, the character’s, inner landscape, substituted and then replaced entirely by one that seeks stimulation above all else, the latter for it’s sudden appearance of violence, not muted nor ellipted (as ellis is so prone to do in the informers), but placed front and center – gory and transgressive and yet all the more horrifying because the main character is so numb that he doesn’t grasp the totality of his actions, he only wishes for it to be over, apathetic to the moral sin he has committed.
structurally, of course, the economies of luxury succeed in demonstrating emptiness, in a sense harkening to what baudrillard termed the desert of the real. people seek pleasure, seek markers and symbols of having made it in the economic and capitalist system – but the achievement of knowing people like michael jackson is all the more impoverished and unreal for the fact that everyone knows it. everyone wears the latest brands, everyone has a trust fund baby. in essence - nothing can be filling if we are fed fever dreams. of course, there are characters aware or perhaps cognizant on some level that they are experiencing soul death - self-medication and drugging pervades through the novel. this medication as a deficient symbol of healing, as a substitution for the lack of meaningful events and emotional life, is explored and perused and subsequently found wanting. characters bleed into each other: ellis chooses to rarely name his cast, to show in absentia their individual lives, as they all seek the same lifestyle, the goal of having it all - cash, clothes, sex, drugs, beauty. there is almost a mocking, satirical way in which he uses the personal perspective, as if he asks, if none of us live our own individual lives, then what’s the point of distinguishing ourselves, calling myself “I”? indeed, one of the most effective parts of ellis’ critique is his usage of the first person, and his blurring of the various individual “I” characters into a barely distinguishable melange. in it, he inverts the act of self definition, naming, and turns it into a hazy placeholder.
where ellis fails, unfortunately, is in message. not all the stories of the informers is tightly written, not all of them seem braced for a punch. the blurriness of the various personas instead encourages reader diffidence. in places, the story seems poised to describe nothing more than the heat illusions that plague the story’s characters, and no amount of technical handwaving can revive a plot or message that, from the very beginning, had no meaning to begin with. if one came here to look for social consciousness, a social commentary – ellis can sometimes leave readers disappointed. it’s certainly no american psycho, at least.
janainaart
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