Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"With trademark exuberance and venom, Indiana here spins a dizzying tale....Bald descriptions of Evangeline's incestuous acts with [her son] are disturbing, but [in] the second half...the plot takes on the appeal of an elegantly executed train wreck. Indiana has plenty of room to send up what he sees as the strangely empty landscape of American culture, while his dashing prose sweeps the reader along to a climax that is no less compelling for being inevitable." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"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." Library Journal
Review
"The problem with Depraved Indifference is that identity theft is one episode for TV and thin gruel for an entire novel. Fraud requires chutzpah, but chutzpah requires feeding, and Indiana never quite finds a way to build on the initial cons of these grifters....Which is not to say that some of Indiana's portraits aren't charming and humorous....But as Indiana's portraits grow, his action flags. Indeed, for all its literary aspirations, Depraved Indifference is more sandwich than novel, leaving the reader both hungry and indifferent." Jonathan Levi, The Los Angeles Times
Review
"[Evangeline is] a truly memorable villain....The novel...is a hyperkinetic depiction of unbridled greed....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 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." Publishers Weekly
Review
"[A] greatly entertaining novel with dozens of passages of sharp insight and dark humor." Daniel Woodrell, Washington Post Book World
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.