The Informers. Ellis, Bret Easton. New York: Vintage, 1994.
Generally considered to be among the weakest of Ellis' works, The Informers is a victim of its own form as the author's only short story collection. In a way it qualifies as a novel since many of the characters from Ellis' universe reappear and interact. The problem is the utter anonymity of Ellis characters as well as the uniformity of their appearances. The latter is expressed strongly in American Psycho in which one of the running gags (or tropes) is how Patrick Bateman is unsure of the identity of the people that he sees at parties and clubs. In fact, Bateman himself is completely mistaken for a colleague by Paul Allen simply because both he and his doppelganger wear Armani suits and Oliver Peoples eyeglasses. Whether or not these two men have different personalities is inconsequential. Ellis is all about "surface, surface, surface" (to paraphrase the man himself).
Why doesn't this work in The Informers? Because the incredibly toneless narration robs the cast of any semblance of sympathy and cognizance to the reader. It's hard enough to stomach a dose of absolute nihilism in a novel with a coherent plot and a protagonist. The short story form makes Ellis' words even more unhitched from anything approaching morality, justice or decency. If you don't care about an Ellis protagonist; a Clay, Patrick Bateman or Victor Ward, then why would you care about a narrator who you only have twenty pages to get to know?
This problem is compounded by the necessarily Ellisean aspect of characters. Or to put it rhetorically (for those that have read the book): what is the difference between Tim and Graham? Besides the obvious connections to each character (parents, who they are fucking, etc.) there really is no difference. Both have the same personality, same interests, both are wealthy, hang out at the same places, even dress similar. Even in appearance Ellisland is uniform: blondness, tallness and attractiveness are ubiquitous. The only ethnic minorities in The Informers (besides some Hispanics used as scenery) are surfers.
The result is that when one reads this novel one often forgets just who is who. Unlike in Less than Zero (which is pretty close to this novel stylistically) there is no main narrative to hold together the plot and the reader's attention. Ellis has publicly stated that the film adaptation of this novel was the greatest of the four that have been done on his work and it's no wonder why. What the film is able to do is to lace together the independent stories (albeit at the expense of some others that are left out) in a way that is never really done in the novel since there is no sense of chronology. The result is that we know why Martin is not Graham and Graham not Martin. In the book the distinction is much less clear.
Ellis is not one to place particular attention toward development of character as his premise is that surface develops character far more than do thoughts or emotions. So much of Ellisland is about being the right type of person at the right types of places having access to the right types of debauchery and sex. Whether or not you happen to be eloquent, sympathetic or even coherent is far less important. There is no room for free thinkers in such a morally depraved view of the world. Though Ellis never makes this point clear in his work, his devotion to surface and its nihilistic consequences makes him a moralist, albeit a subtle one.
The Informers is imperfect as is often true of short story collections. But as a work it is decidedly in line with Ellis' literary experiment
– if you create characters that have everything and can do anything, is there anything left to be said beyond the surface? Apparently not.
