The Informers

The City Is Los Angeles, in the very recent past. The birthplace and graveyard of American myths and dreams, it harbors a group of people trapped between the sybaritic beauty of their surroundings and their own damning moral impoverishment. The Informers is a chronicle of their voices -- fused into an intense, impressionistic narrative that spans and blurs genders, generations and even identities -- all of them suffering from nothing less than the death of the soul.

Each of the characters in this extraordinary book describes connections between people (classmates and best friends, sometimes dead; a decrepit rock star and his retinue; estranged or ex-husbands and wives, as well as their current, often improbable partners; sex dates and vampires) who remain in every important way strangers. A father inveigles his distant son into a holiday jaunt to Hawaii ... a car crashes in the desert, a plane goes down in the mountains ... a girl returns home to her future by cross-country train, while another spends her final days on the beach ... a couple visits the zoo, for the last time or not. In telling these stories, they escape or condemn or resign themselves, knowing that the bright veneer of their lives, blinding as sunshine, is not enough to help them; knowing also that they have little else to justify their presence in the world.

Bret Easton Ellis writes with absolute clarity and great depth of feeling about the struggle to find coherence in an environment that might well have lost it entirely. Savagely funny, poignant and uncompromising, The Informers unmasks both a city and an age.