the informers

I took Bret Easton Elis's 'The Informers' from Mykle or Kai's bookshelf. I enjoyed the movie 'the rules of attraction', and have been meaning to get around to reading him.
I had to stop halfway thru. While it's definitely quite well-written, has totally believable characters and situations, the stories are moderately interesting, etc, it was making me feel horrible. It's a novel about how being a rich yuppie or a rich yuppie's child in Los Angeles destroys the soul of such RY or RY's child. Which even tho it's not *news* could still make fine reading, except that it was destroying my soul as well. It reminds me of the movie Short Cuts, which actually figured in the break-up of me and a girlfriend because i was stricken by a horrifying and sudden loss of soul from watching the film, and she Wasn't, and that in turn was horrifying and distancing. (Believe it or not, Polanski's Bitter Moon played a similar part in this soul-sucking movie - influenced break up. Maybe i shouldn't take movies so seriously.)

Added to Orion's List of Reasons Not To Date Him:

• if he experiences a loss of soul from a movie and you don't, he will break up with you*.
  

So i stopped The Informers halfway thru. But it's a fine book anyhow.

Am now reading Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man, a 1951 Signet sci-fi novel about a seriously virile CEO of a huge corporation in 2301 who decides he has to murder the CEO of a rival huge corporation and, the cover leads me to believe, gets away with it despite the omnipresence of psychic mind-readers in the society of 2301. This again, thanks to Kai.



* This somewhat misstates the case. It should be more like

• if he experi...and you don't, you will soon dump him and crush his heart, and BOY will you probably feel a twinge of regret at some point in the distant future, so really, it's not worth the risk and you should probably leave this guy alone**.

** This also misrepresents poor ____. If you're reading this ____, um, i guess i just hope you're not reading this.