A review by rosievox
The Informers by Bret Easton Ellis

5.0

A friend gave me this for Christmas and initially I was like, really? The American Psycho guy? (A very silly take on my part, to be sure.) Anyway, within a page I was in and swept away by the dark, narcotized, slightly woozy feel of this book that vibrates and trembles through every short story, nightmare-rumbling just beneath the voice of every new narrator. It was *so* good and actually exactly the kind of thing I love to read - short, snap-shot moments that nevertheless feel leisurely and nuanced, about rich, highly privileged people who are nevertheless totally miserable and empty. Only knowing Ellis as 'The American Psycho guy' I was surprised by actually how sedate and tender a lot of this book felt. Even though the characters and their actions are all pretty grim, and there's an avoidance in his writing of probing too deeply into the characters' interiors, he does such a great job of communicating the dwindling, but, like, precious, humanity of these people. At first I was a little thrown by all the repetition in the dialogue, and how superficial a lot of them seem, but as the book went on I was kind of amazed by the cumulative effect of it: how disconnected these people were from each other and themselves and the world. And I think actually what could be interpreted as disinterested writing, or writing that's a little standoffish or detached or whatever, is actually just total lack of judgement, and in that space alongside each other are empathy and some kind of void. There's a matter-of-factness to the writing while describing all these people drifting in and out of each other's lives with no real purpose or meaning that reminded me a lot of the kind of writing that's become synonymous with young, female millennial writers now. Some of the stories were stronger than others, but I just enjoyed the heck out of reading them all, not knowing where Ellis was going to take me next. After about 80 pages I put the book down for 5 months because Life Stuff and when I picked it back up again, I tore through it, under the searing, inescapable heat of July 2021, and I didn't bother trying to juggle all the characters and timelines in my head as they made cameos in other stories. For me, thinking that the timelines might be purposefully misaligned really added to the overall feeling of this being about a group of people in a city tumbling towards hell, or perhaps already in it. Loved this. Definitely one to reread.