‘Bruce Calls from Mulholland’ by Bret Easton Ellis

I bought Ellis’s book The Informers in hardback when I was on holiday, and nowhere did the blurb say it was a collection of stories, so I read it as a novel. This was both difficult – it’s not a novel – and easy – Ellis’s characters are interchangeable, so it just felt even more dissociated than his other books, but not different in substance. And when I found it was actually a collection of stories, I was disappointed. All that work I put in! ‘Bruce Calls from Mulholland’ is the opening chapter – sorry, first story – and it’s just bog-standard Ellis: stoned and sunburned, written with the blank deadness that I didn’t realise, until I read Joan Didion’s fiction, was a straight lift from Joan Didion’s fiction. It is probably not a great story in its own right – but that’s not how I read it anyway.

First published in The Informers, Picador, 1994