Resentment: A Comedy (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents) - Softcover

Indiana, Gary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1584351721 ISBN 13: 9781584351726

Publisher: Semiotext(e), 2015

Synopsis

In a novel capturing an era that seems at once familiar and grotesque, a New York writer lands in Los Angeles in 1994.

Originally published in 1997, Resentment was the first in Gary Indiana's now-classic trilogy (followed in 1999 by Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story and in 2003 by Depraved Indifference) chronicling the more-or-less permanent state of “depraved indifference” that characterized American life at the millennium's end.

In Resentment, Seth, a New York–based writer arrives in Los Angeles (where he has history and friends) in mid-August, 1994, to observe what will become the marathon parricide trial of the wealthy, athletic, and troubled Martinez brothers, broadcast live every day on Court TV. Still reeling from the end of his obsessive courtship of a young SoHo artist/waiter, Seth moves between a room at the Chateau Marmont and a Mount Washington shack owned by his old cab-driving, ex-Marxist friend, Jack, while he writes a profile of Teddy Wade―one of the era's hottest young actors, who has “dared” to star as a gay character in a new Hollywood film. Studded throughout with scathing satirical portraits of media figures, other writers, and the Martinez trial teams, Resentment captures an era that seems, two decades later, at once grotesque, familiar, and a precursor to our own.

About this title

Review

Since the mid-1970s, Gary Indiana has been making a name for himself as a renegade thinker and writer. In the Village Voice and Rolling Stone he created a new brand of highly personal, overtly political cultural commentary that has reshaped journalism. His novels and short stories are equally controversial. Resentment, his new novel, is a true hybrid of his art. Based on Indiana's coverage of the Menendez brothers' trial, the novel is an all-out, savagely funny attack on the media, the U.S. justice system, television, family, and Los Angeles. Indiana is relentless in his desire to expose the insanity that rages beneath the surface of U.S. life and determined to make us laugh out loud even as we shake our heads in sorry recognition.

From the Publisher

Day of the Locusts meets Bonfire of the Vanities in this searing burlesque about everyone from the east coast literati to Hollywood's superagents, actors, has-beens and wannabes. Gary Indiana takes no prisoners as he sets his "hero," B-magazine writer Seth, out in Los Angeles to do a celebrity profile of a famous hetero actor who has just taken a major role as a homosexual with AIDS. While on the West Coast, Seth becomes mildly, then completely obsessed with the trial of two privileged young men who are accused of killing their parents in cold blood as they lay sleeping in their Beverly Hills home.

Indiana weaves the story of Seth and his not inconsequential resentment for the world at large with the riveting "Martinez" case as it unfolds before the American public. Ironically, hilariously, and ingeniously, Indiana juxtaposes both stories in this blackest of comedies, as he reveals the role of resentment in all human relationships, and the darker side of L.A. roiling beneath the glamour. The media loves nothing more than itself, and no writer/agent/actor/journalist will be able to resist this tell-all novel about all the beautiful people.

About this edition

• Publisher: Semiotext(e)
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1584351721
• ISBN 13: 9781584351726
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 392