Books, Arts & Manners: That’s Our Boy

The Informers, by Bret Easton Ellis (Knopf, 226pp., $22)

GIVEN THE angrily dismissive reception of Mr. Ellis’s new book—“as cynical, shallow, and stupid as the people it depicts,” according to the New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani—there is a natural temptation to try to find something nice to say about it. Unfortunately, the book is bad and there is no way around that fact. But it is not without interest, precisely for the way in which it epitomizes mainstream “quality” culture of the type beloved by such people as Miss Kakutani.

JG

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James Gardner

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The Informers, by Bret Easton Ellis (Knopf, 226pp., $22)

GIVEN THE angrily dismissive reception of Mr. Ellis’s new book—“as cynical, shallow, and stupid as the people it depicts,” according to the New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani—there is a natural temptation to try to find something nice to say about it. Unfortunately, the book is bad and there is no way around that fact. But it is not without interest, precisely for the way in which it epitomizes mainstream “quality” culture of the type beloved by such people as Miss Kakutani.