The Informers - Bret Easton Ellis [0]
THE INFORMERS
“The Informers cuts a more sweeping swath through Less Than Zero’s dazzling, decadent California lifestyle.… [It] is clearly the work of a wiser, more self-assured writer.”
—Miami Herald
“I can’t think of Ellis without recalling Orwell and Jack Kerouac: social observers who used documentary realism in novels that cast a keen eye on the times in which they lived. The journalistic approaches of Orwell, Kerouac, and Ellis take wildly different forms, but their passages of real life are similar in effect.… Ellis’s descriptive powers in defining time and place are precise and horrifying.”
—Seattle Weekly
“[With] a canny journalist’s eye for detail and dialogue, Ellis’ storytelling carries the complete lack of sentiment and empathy of a seasoned nihilistic novelist.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Sparkles with a disturbing mix of humor and ultraviolence.”
—Detroit Free Press
“A profoundly moral writer [with a] characteristically spare and hypnotic prose style which beats out these lives of quiet desperation with a slow pulse as gentle as it is compelling.… Ellis has been compared to Fitzgerald and here we see why.”
—Modern Review
“The Informers is full of morbid Gothic sensibility, sick jokes and outrageous detail … hilarious … ambitious.… It [has] sharp observations and impeccably controlled prose.”
—Newsday
“The Informers shows the work of a writer at the peak of his powers, deeply concerned with the moral decline of our society. The book takes us from the first to the seventh circles of hell, from Salinger to de Sade.”
—Will Self
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, AUGUST 1995
Copyright © 1994 by Bret Easton Ellis
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1994.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Ellis, Bret Easton.
The informers / Bret Easton Ellis.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-75644-2
I. Title.
PS3555.L.5937I54 1994
813’.54—dc20
94-4012
Author photograph © Quintana Roo Dunne
v3.1_r1
One night I was sitting on the bed in my hotel room on Bunker Hill, down in the middle of Los Angeles. It was an important night in my life, because I had to make a decision about the hotel. Either I paid up or I got out: that was what the note said, the note the landlady had put under my door. A great problem, deserving acute attention. I solved it by turning out the lights and going to bed.
JOHN FANTE
Ask the Dust
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
1 Bruce Calls from Mulholland
2 At the Still Point
3 The Up Escalator
4 In the Islands
5 Sitting Still
6 Water from the Sun
7 Discovering Japan
8 Letters from L.A.
9 Another Gray Area
10 The Secrets of Summer
11 The Fifth Wheel
12 On the Beach
13 At the Zoo with Bruce
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
1
BRUCE CALLS FROM MULHOLLAND
Bruce calls, stoned and sunburned, from Los Angeles and tells me that he’s sorry. He tells me he’s sorry for not being here, at campus with me. He tells me that I was right, that he should have flown to the workshop this summer, and he tells me that he’s sorry he’s not in New Hampshire and that he’s sorry he hasn’t called me in a week and I ask him what he’s doing in Los Angeles and don’t mention that it has been two months.
Bruce tells me that things went bad ever since Robert left the apartment they were sharing on Fifty-sixth and Park and went on a white-water-rafting trip with his stepfather down the Colorado River, leaving his girlfriend, Lauren, who also lives in the apartment on Fifty-sixth and Park, and Bruce alone, together, for four weeks. I have never met Lauren but I know what kind of girl Robert is attracted to and I can picture what she must look like clearly in my mind and then I’m thinking of the girls who are