Set in Los Angeles in the early 1980's, this coolly mesmerizing novel is a raw, powerful portrait of a lost generation who have experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age, in a world shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money a place devoid of feeling or hope.
Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern college and re-enters a landscape of limitless privilege and absolute moral entropy, where everyone drives Porches, dines at Spago, and snorts mountains of cocaine. He tries to renew feelings for his girlfriend, Blair, and for his best friend from high school, Julian, who is careering into hustling and heroin. Clay's holiday turns into a dizzying spiral of desperation that takes him through the relentless parties in glitzy mansions, seedy bars, and underground rock clubs and also into the seamy world of L.A. after dark.
From Publishers Weekly
Ellis serves up his usual blend of phony personalities, 1980s conspicuous consumption, joyless sex and abundant drug use in this 1994 novel about making it in L.A. The narration is split between Christian Rummel and Therese Plummer, who take advantage of the novel's over-the-top characters and scenarios to offer a theatrical reading that is surprisingly compelling. Ellis's penchant for shallow yet complex personalities has found its perfect match in this pair of performers who know exactly how to play the characters from start to finish. A Simon & Schuster hardcover. (May)
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From Library Journal
Although billed as a novel, this work reads like a collection of 13 loosely related short stories. The characters in Chapter 1 reappear in the last chapter, and Jamie, whose death occurs in Chapter 2, may be the vampire named Jamie who later appears. None of this much matters, however, since the characters have no personality anyway. Every chapter is told by a different narrator, further preventing the reader from connecting to the characters. Set in Eighties L.A. like Ellis's debut, Less Than Zero, the book makes endless, almost obsessive references to obscure bands, upscale restaurants, and clothing of the time. For Ellis, this seems to have been a time when "people [were] becoming less human...everyone [was] operating on a very primitive level," but, unfortunately, the effect is of an era safely past. The Informers has fewer gruesome scenes than American Psycho, and its affectlessness renders them less powerful. Still, this is a disturbing book that will be requested by patrons familiar with Ellis's work.
Nora Rawlinson, formerly with "Library Journal"
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.