| Title | : | Depraved Indifference (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1635901111 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781635901115 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Kindle Edition |
| Number of Pages | : | 344 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1969 |
The third of Gary Indiana's famed crime trilogy tells a story inspired by the virtuoso con artistry of mother-and-son criminals Sante and Kenneth Kimes.
She collected future marks like lottery tickets. She operated by reflex. Any public room was a pristine harvest of human information. Not just business cards, phone numbers, fax numbers and the like, but weaknesses, quirks, character flaws, delusional ambitions, risky dreams, medical problems, shaky marriages. Everybody came equipped with a panel of invisible buttons.... If you had the right touch, if you knew how to press one button lightly and another button with a bit more force, you could make the emotional side of a person swing up and down as you wished.
—from Depraved Indifference
First published in 2001, Depraved Indifference is the third of Gary Indiana's famed crime trilogy now being reissued by Semiotext(e). Inspired by the virtuoso con artistry of mother-and-son criminals Sante and Kenneth Kimes, Depraved Indifference follows Evangeline Slote, a dead ringer for Elizabeth Taylor “so compulsive she grifts herself when she runs out of other people” through the circus of calamity that her compulsions invoke. Evangeline, or “Evelyn Carson, “Princess Shah Shah,” among other pseudonyms, accompanied by her alcoholic husband Warren and fanatically devoted son Devin, moves from Las Vegas to Hawaii to Nassau in a maelstrom of forgery and fraud that constantly threatens to come undone. When Warren dies, Evangeline and her son embark upon an ever more brazen series of grifts, frauds, and crimes. Thriving on chaos, a master of manipulation and seduction, Evangeline concocts the scheme to end all schemes—which may take a murder to complete.
Reminiscent of Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust, Indiana's scathing, insightful prose is a mirror to the empty landscape of American culture.
Depraved Indifference (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents) Reviews
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Well written and fun to read. Unexpectedly depraved characters!
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True crime is boring. It's formulaic, traffics in intimate pain, and exposes its subjects – both perpetrators and their victims – to public judgment and ridicule. Gary Indiana turns the clichés of true crime on its head, transforming the story of real-life fraudster-murderers into a captivating fictional tale.
The bare bones of the plot are there: A mother-"father"-son crime trio hangs paper, steals social security numbers, cheats old ladies out of their property, and preys on a network of homeless people, immigrants, and addicts to do their dirty work. They race up and down across the West Coast, jet to Hawaii and the Bahamas, and wiggle through New York, staying a few steps ahead of the insurance companies and the even more pathetic cops as they lie, cheat, and steal their way through 90s America. Even death won't stop them in their quest for... wealth? prestige? satiety? It's not clear if they even have a goal, but the story is rough, funny, and tragic in the right amounts. Especially tragic for me was Indiana's voluminous vocabulary, which kept me with my dictionary app by my side (and constantly peppering nearby friends to do my dirty work for me), as I racked my brain for the definition of "obsequious" and dozens of other rare jewels.
But where Indiana succeeds is through his mastery of perspective and perception. He worms deep into the minds of his characters, unearthing their most embarrassing thoughts and actions. There is nothing heroic about these people, just as there are no real heroes in our lives. Everyone has debased thoughts, past actions that they would rather forget, and complicated relationships with their most beloved friends and family. These are the things that keep us up at night – and that we think we tell no one. But we hint at our insecurities in our mannerisms, our speech patterns, and our silences. Indiana reminds us that it's easier to get into someone's head (and their pocketbook) than we think. We're all vulnerable and needy, and the sudden appearance of a brilliant and beautiful charmer is sometimes all that separates us from a series of bad decisions with dangerous consequences. In the train wreck of contemporary America, we're just one misstep away from disaster.
PS: Read Three Month Fever, Indiana's fictionalized retelling of the murder of Versace. I promise it's better than any TV show or documentary. -
vibed w/ this on, like, a molecular level. scornful as christina stead, pugnacious as ellroy, word-drunk as a. theroux, spookily immersive as vollmann. plus imo you can draw more or less a straight line from the homer & langley collyer warren of quitclaims, shell corps, DBAs, phony IDs, etc that evangeline constructs around herself & those pix of top secret docs piled in a mar-a-lago bathroom, or clarence thomas gobbling yumyums from this or that hyperwealthy benefactor. improbably, wonderfully, there are still favorites to be discovered @ this late hour. keep on reading folks
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Weird… very weird… who are all these people…
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A blackly comic novel about a family of con artists, all of whom are terrible people. Nothing but fun stuff.
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adept satire
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Sadly his name is not really Gary Indiana. Nor is he from Indiana. He sure likes using "c**t" in his novel.
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My personal favorite of Gary Indiana's true crime trilogy. I wish HBO would pick it up for a mini series. It'd be grand. Exceptional work.
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One of the three novels Indiana has written that are based on true crime events. He has an incredible vocabulary and is a great story teller. I'm loving this.
