Depraved Indifference [Hardcover]

Gary Indiana (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 22, 2002

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.

Editorial Reviews

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.

From Library Journal

This final installment in Indiana's American crime trilogy, following Three Month Fever and Resentment: A Comedy, is based on the recent case of notorious grifters Sante and Kenneth Kimes. The central character is the sociopathic Evangeline Sloate, a Liz Taylor look-alike and con artist extraordinaire. After the death of Warren, her wealthy husband, with whom she has engaged in such illegalities as financial fraud, arson, and the enslavement of her Mexican housemaids (the one thing for which she has served time), she moves on to a series of increasingly ruthless cons. She and son Devin, who has taken Warren's place in her bed along with becoming her partner in crime, plot to take over ownership of a Manhattan townhouse that belongs to elderly socialite Wanda "Baby" Claymore a scheme that requires Mrs. Claymore's murder. Acidly satiric, the novel sets its sights on exposing both the "depraved indifference" of the Sloates and the larger society that breeds and abets them. Recommended for public libraries that own Indiana's two earlier works. Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: HarperCollins; 1st edition (January 22, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060197269
• ISBN-13: 978-0060197261
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,026,838 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Challenging, shocking; not for everyone, March 20, 2002

By 

David Rosen (Berkeley, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Depraved Indifference (Hardcover)

Pay no attention to those who gleefuly eviscerated this book - it's a triumph of wit, style and narrative structure. Indiana takes a tabloidy crime story worthy of a Lifetime movie (this one actually was) and gives it layers and layers of style and nuance. It's like R. Crumb re-writing a story from the National Enquirer: darkly comic, elaborately imagined, terrifying. It hardly skims over incest - Indiana brings both mother and son to excruciatingly detailed inner life. The novel is a risk-taker in both prose and ideas, and it's not entirely successful, but its characters, images and whacked-out turns of phrase sting and linger.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars deal with it..., March 22, 2002

By 

Jon 9 "JON9" (Silver Lake, Ca) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Depraved Indifference (Hardcover)

the darkest sides of human nature are not always easy to look at - but there is a value in doing so. and there is a value to those storytellers amongst us who can live inside the heads of characters as venal, narcissistic and evil as these.

i loved Indiana's writing. his descriptions of, say, the industrial wastelands of newark, new jersey are downright beautiful, and surprising, drawing parallels between the characters in the novel and the environments they find themselves, and besides I like a good run on sentence since I'm not the sort of person who believes in strict formulas or is immune to the charms of an idiosyncratic intellect suffused with style exercising little restraint in turning a phrase.

not a book for everyone, but I for one will be seeking out and reading other works from Indiana.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Do you want to meet these people?, January 27, 2005

By 

moth "mothnm" (Abiquiu, NM United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Depraved Indifference (Hardcover)

Depraved Indifference by Gary Indiana

Even by his name you know the author will be a clever boy.

Ten pages into Depraved Indifference it is difficult to see why to read a novel about a chaotic, scheming, abusive, rich Elizabeth Taylor lookalike who was found guilty on charges of enslaving her household staff. Plus she is supposedly based on a real life person. Yech. The other main characters, one a drunk, gloating California businessman and the other, a delusions-of-grandeur mama's boy, offered even less enticement.

It is easy to track the main characters that change their names frequently. Tracking secondary characters requires concentration.

Indiana's vocabulary seems like he played a little game of including Dictionary.com's word of the day every day.

Then why read this? For a change of pace. Indiana is a hip NYer so reading his fiction is a vicarious piece of hip. When you live in the desert how else would you have contact with hip? Because the NYers have second homes here? Not the ones I want to read about. Since one only occasionally recognizes karmic returns in real life why not settle for the clarity of fiction? Read it to find out that the lead thief is ashamed of her indifference to humankind? Okay, that's not a reason to read it.

There is incest, child abuse, and infidelity included in a whole range of misbehavior. It doesn't seem funny when some old hag usurps her son's budding sexuality or when the only person she can express love and tenderness to is the most victimized kid on the planet. Some people probably think it's a hoot though.

The reason I checked out Indiana's fiction was a 2004 New York Magazine article about East Village artists. Since Indiana professes to have been in love with Cookie Mueller maybe he will utilize her positive outlook amidst seemingly negative circumstance. I liked his Village Voice Susan Sontag eulogy too. For a hip guy who you would assume would excel at viciousness he is the most charming when he writes about who and what he knows and loves.

By page 200 I am still wondering why I am supposed to want to read about snakepit people. At least he doesn't love them. I double-check money accounts to make sure my puny assets are still intact. Is this some cautionary tale of how and where identity thieves operate? Do those-in-the-know chortle, recognizing the real life people these characters are modeled on? Is it a modern Dickens story, bringing characters from the beginning back into the plot? Where is the sympathetic character navigating the Dickensian twists?

Towards end when you think things should be wrapping up the author is still bringing in new characters.

When the main characters finally try New York (why not New York? They wore out their welcome everywhere else) the locals recognize them as obvious cons. There's an idea: Herd these people to New York where the game is over.

Indiana resists torquing his plot into a potential Hollywood hit with some investigator helping the feisty daughter-from-the-previous-marriage con the cons and walk off with all the loot. It would have been a logical conclusion since the conneds' names and social security numbers are on the documents.

I wouldn't recommend the book to my next door neighbor who has been battling identity theft for a few years. It is too irrelevant to what his experience has been (including his own minor cons) and too indifferent.

The subject matter is timely. Lots of people are willing to maneuver numbers in illegal ways (steal) rather than work for a living.

The thieves are creative and active in their approach to survival. Financially, they thrive. When you are a working stiff theft seems wrong but admirable. Living outside the rules seems disorderly but more alive. Immorality doesn't impair ones ability to sleep at night. Being victimized impairs your ability to sleep. It seems funny when the dog or the magpies steal. Still, it would have been all right to never read about the characters in this book.

You could say it didn't cost anything to read this novel but aside from the cost of the book it cost me one day skiing.