From Publishers Weekly
Malcolm reads Marx's Capital, volume one, with his orange juice; Caroline reads Kierkegaard and ponders string theory; and Jesse, traveling in Istanbul, seduces a string of accommodating hotel waiters, taking careful notes in his journal. Beneath the contemporary excesses Indiana chronicles in this sixth novel (after Depraved Indifference), we can see the outlines of the older New York bohemia captured by Dawn Powell, and a similarly ironic treatment of its denizens. During the course of one summer in New York City, the intermittent first-person narrator, a gallery curator, receives news from his far-flung friends, out of which he builds this shapeless, episodic record of their crises. Caroline and Denise move back to the city from Santa Fe after Caroline, a once promising writer, starts having psychotic hallucinations, draining Denise's affection and bank account. Miles, a playwright living in the country, develops an exaggerated grudge against Tova Finkelstein, a prominent Susan Sontag-like intellectual who convinces Miles's actor friends to abandon his play for a series of Beckett monologues that she is directing. Arthur, a gay producer to whom the narrator loaned some money, has come back from a Spanish island after his lover, the painter Oliver, was ambushed by several friends in an intervention designed to break two of Oliver's nasty habits: drinking and Arthur. Many other aspirants and posers drift through the novel, which, compared to Indiana's earlier work, is surprisingly compassionate and attuned to the inner lives of its characters. There is no shortage of salty observations ("Bruce and Adam used to walk around the neighborhood together, looking inseparable as two vampire bats with their wings intertwined"), but Indiana avoids easy targets and transcends his urge to shock. The result is some of the best prose of his career.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From the Back Cover
Praise for Gary Indiana
Depraved Indifference
“Gary Indiana delves into the minds of his creepy, appalling characters with such probing wit and lip-smacking glee that we actually enjoy our time with these amoral monsters.”
---John Waters, author and director of Hairspray
“These days [Indiana is] the chronicler of America’s long, dark slide into sleaze.... Depraved Indifference is a delightfully sordid and propulsive read.” ---The Village Voice
“Sordid and brilliant...This is a greatly entertaining novel with dozens of passages of sharp insight and dark humor.... Gary Indiana is a fearless and valuable writer, willing to recount anything human beings are capable of with a kind of angry compassion and a spritz of disgust.” ---Washington Post
“Extravagant and full of wisecracks, but also deadly serious, as the best satirical writing always is.” ---Boston Globe
“A sardonic, thermonuclear course into the heart of American darkness.” ---The Memphis Commercial Appeal
“Gary Indiana has made a name for himself as an edgy chronicler of the fictional trials of the rich and powerful.” ---Entertainment Weekly
“With trademark exuberance and venom, Indiana... spins a dizzying tale...”
---Kirkus Review (starred review)
Three Month Fever
“A legitimate heir to the crime-related nonfiction novel: Capote on peyote.” ---Chicago Reader
“In Indiana’s ingenious hands, what a bewitching, rollicking folly Three Month Fever becomes. In a book packed with sharp insight, clever writing, and emotional verve, Indiana has grasped the warped cultural context in which murders and media converge.” ---Washington Post
ard“A spellbinding fusion of journalism, social commentary, and novelistic license.” ---Entertainment Weekly
