Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Challenging, shocking; not for everyone,
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...,
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?,
By moth "mothnm" (Abiquiu, NM United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Depraved Indifference (Hardcover)
Depraved Indifference by Gary IndianaEven 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.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
See all 6 books this book cites
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product).
|
