Depraved Indifference - Softcover
Gary Indiana, a "huge satirical talent" ("New York Times"), brings us a darkly comic novel fueled by the virtuoso con artist Evangeline Slote and her extravagant life of chicanery and petty crime. She thrives on seduction, manipulation, and the humiliation of everybody in her orbit. And she has a genius for generating chaos and panic among her real and imaginary enemies. Until her conviction on slavery charges brought against her by several ungrateful Mexican housemaids, Evangeline, a dead ringer for Elizabeth Taylor, lives in perpetual motion. She and her husband, Warren, a self-made real estate mogul at the end of a long alcoholic decline, breezily shift from Las Vegas to Hawaii to Nassau, torching their homes for insurance money, dabbling in myriad forms of financial fraud, and constantly altering their identities to evade the law. When Warren dies, Evangeline is desperate to jump-start yet another new life, bankrolled by Warren's far-flung and hard-to-locate assets, while keeping his death secret from the world at large, but particularly from his "former children," her stepchildren and the beneficiaries of his will. Fortunately, she has an eager accomplice in Devin, her fanatically devoted and easily manipulated son. Surrounded by a cohort of burnouts, hapless suckers, and fellow grifters, Evangeline cooks up the ultimate con. To complete the intricate scheme, she will stop at nothing, including murder. "Depraved Indifference" is a dissection of the mind of a charismatic sociopath and a satire of the society that appeases and abets her. With razor-fine insight, Gary Indiana, "one of the most important chroniclers of the modern psyche," ("The Guardian") wields his scathing, insightful prose with authority and to devastating effect.
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About the Author:
Gary Indiana's novels include Resentment: A Comedy, Rent Boy, Gone Tomorrow, and Horse Crazy. He has published two collections of short fiction and a collection of essays, Let It Bleed. His plays include the award-winning Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, The Roman Polanski Story, and Phantoms of Louisiana. His nonfiction work has appeared in the Village Voice, Artforum, Details, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and numerous other publications. He lives in New York and Los Angeles.
From Publishers Weekly:
Amphetamine fiction is alive and writhing in Indiana's ninth book, a caper novel of life on the grift. The narrative follows the exploits of a truly memorable villain called (among other aliases) Evangeline, a lowlife spawn of the Vegas mire (maybe) who rises from her station by sheer mania and depraved indifference to anyone around her. Based on real-life murderer Santee Kimes, Evangeline is a monster, "so compulsive she grifts herself when she runs out of other people." Her career was launched in the Vietnam era when she married a crooked real estate developer named Warren Slote. Now an apathetic has-been drinking himself to death, Warren watches with detached amusement as Evangeline tries to take him to the cleaners. Evangeline's desire is to live as a self-styled queen, and she usually takes her marks (their identities, assets, lives and all) while looking for ways to set up tacky palaces on someone else's tab. The novel, with its Vegas roots, its run-on sentences and gut-wrenching displays of venality, is a hyperkinetic depiction of unbridled greed, the American dream's septic tank. But the book's lightning jumps backward and forward through time, its ever-changing POVs and often confusing plot make its course too convoluted. This is the third of Indiana's recent works inspired by real-life crimes (Resentment took off on the Menendez trial, and Three Month Fever was a "nonfiction" novel about the killer of Gianni Versace). The blatant villainy of Santee Kimes and her son, Kenneth, have spawned a public avid for an interpretation of their sociopathic behavior. This novel is too complex and confusing to attract tabloid readers, but Indiana's fans will probably speed through it, focusing on some of the most hideous characters ever to congeal in the form.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherHarperCollins
- Publication date2002
- ISBN 10 0704381656
- ISBN 13 9780704381650
- BindingPaperback
- Edition number1
- Rating
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