Depraved Indifference

by Gary Indiana, A. S. Hamrah (Introduction)

Overview

The third of Gary Indiana's famed crime trilogy tells a story inspired by the virtuoso con artistry of mother-and-son criminals Sante and Kenneth Kimes.

She collected future marks like lottery tickets. She operated by reflex. Any public room was a pristine harvest of human information. Not just business cards, phone numbers, fax numbers and the like, but weaknesses, quirks, character flaws, delusional ambitions, risky dreams, medical problems, shaky marriages. Everybody came equipped with a panel of invisible buttons.... If you had the right touch, if you knew how to press one button lightly and another button with a bit more force, you could make the emotional side of a person swing up and down as you wished.
—from Depraved Indifference

First published in 2001, Depraved Indifference is the third of Gary Indiana's famed crime trilogy now being reissued by Semiotext(e). Inspired by the virtuoso con artistry of mother-and-son criminals Sante and Kenneth Kimes, Depraved Indifference follows Evangeline Slote, a dead ringer for Elizabeth Taylor “so compulsive she grifts herself when she runs out of other people” through the circus of calamity that her compulsions invoke. Evangeline, or “Evelyn Carson, “Princess Shah Shah,” among other pseudonyms, accompanied by her alcoholic husband Warren and fanatically devoted son Devin, moves from Las Vegas to Hawaii to Nassau in a maelstrom of forgery and fraud that constantly threatens to come undone. When Warren dies, Evangeline and her son embark upon an ever more brazen series of grifts, frauds, and crimes. Thriving on chaos, a master of manipulation and seduction, Evangeline concocts the scheme to end all schemes—which may take a murder to complete.

Reminiscent of Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust, Indiana's scathing, insightful prose is a mirror to the empty landscape of American culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781635901085
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	01/07/2020
Series:	Semiotext(e) / Native Agents
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Gary Indiana is a novelist, playwright, critic, essayist, filmmaker, and artist. Hailed by the Guardian as “one of the most important chroniclers of the modern psyche,” and by the Observer as "one of the most woefully underappreciated writers of the last 30 years," he published a memoir, I Can Give You Anything But Love, in 2015. He is also the author of Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story and Resentment: A Comedy (both published by Semiotex(e)).

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Warren

Clutching his heart outside the Wells Fargo Bank in La Jolla, Warren remembers the day he and Devin rode in this same teal Lincoln Town Car up to the Women's Federal Secure Facility a few miles out of Frontera. They were picking up Evangeline, who during her incarceration had sent no end of insane letters to what she referred to in one epic of dubious remorse as “the two great big men in my life,” meaning him, Warren, and Devin, who was thirteen at the time, along with the customary avalanche of legal papers, motions to dismiss in the insurance countersuit case, appellate briefs in the pilfered chinchilla case, an elaborate medical and psychiatric demur in still another case, all of these drafted in journeywoman legalese by Evangeline for polishing by whichever attorneys had not already been stiffed for their fees. There was a civil suit pending that is still pending, bolstered by Evangeline's conviction for coercing servitude or whatever, a case where Warren took a Harry Helmsley walk (albeit a pretty steep walk, if they don't settle the civil case soon and the lawyers for the so-called abused maids take whatever money Warren hasn't already squirreled away in the Caymans and whatever property Warren hasn't signed over in deed trust or what have you to various associates, confidantes, and whatever passes with Warren for a friend), as Warren would plainly admit, if it were the practice among the Slote family ever to plainly admit anything, including their own names. There were process servers lurking all over the countryside like kudzu on a Georgia pine barren, evenpoor Devin had had to deal with them, and until Evangeline's run of bad luck three years earlier (a richly deserved run, in Warren's view), they had been in incessant motion like a bunch of sharks between Oahu and Vegas and Nassau and Puerto Vallarta for god knew how many years, as if by just moving around and altering a few trifles of their public presentation such as name age and Social Security number, they could evade all sorts of unpleasant legalities, which had turned out to be true.

However, the slavery charges involved virtually all these jurisdictions, which made it a federal matter, because at one time or another most of the maids had been kept in all their houses and condos, Evangeline rotated them from residence to residence, as she believed this prevented them from “getting smart,” as she put it, getting rambunctious or above themselves, though she also obliged them to call her Mama and pretend they were part of the family, a family with which they had to make grueling daily efforts to get along, as they were going to be part of this family “forever.” “Forever” was sometimes a whole year, even longer, but some had gotten away during lulls in Evangeline's vigilance, slipped out windows or carelessly unlocked doors, or been dismissed after six months or eight months, Evangeline wanted everything in her realm spotless and shiny and perfect and not every one of these Mexican girls could live up to such imperious standards. Then too, they did not especially appreciate being kicked and punched by Devin at whatever age, or Devin feeling up their skirts for pussy, or being locked into their rooms at night, or being slapped around and pummelled by Evangeline.

Warren perfectly saw their view. In fact, he had even urged one of Evangeline's rather dim procurers, one of these titless wonders from god knew what dreary graduate schools in the midwest that Evangeline enticed via Internet as tutors for Devin, not to bring any new maids in from Mexico -- well, actually he had urged the young woman to bring not more than one or two, as opposed to the five or six that Evangeline was demanding, but he had really meant for her not to bring any. Warren fretted about Devin. He worried that things were happening to Devin that would have an irreversible ugly effect upon Devin. He could not oppose Evangeline in any more important way, so decided to voice his fear that Devin might grow up with Spanish as his first language. Warren said that in his experience, this could have a catastrophic impact on a child who would have to speak English all the time later on. Naturally Warren was drunk, as Warren had to be whenever he planned to sound an unwanted note of reality or even unreality in Evangeline's sensorium. It never got as far as Evangeline anyway, when he sobered up the next day he advised the girl, Janet or Christie or one of them anyway, to forget everything he'd spilled in his cups. He said if she told Evangeline about their conversation he would deny it ever occurred, and then where would Janet or Christie or whomever be? Mama would take Papa's word over any of these ungrateful young hicks who were getting the opportunity of a lifetime working for the Slotes: international travel, gourmet cuisine and so forth, gifts of scarves and trinkets, best of all the festive atmosphere that Mama spread around herself, as she herself said, not unlike the legendary Auntie Mame. Mama referred to the chaos and panic she generated everywhere as her “zest for living.”

Unfortunately, many who lacked this protean zest sooner or later turned against her. Mama believed that everybody made up stories to get away with something and that almost everybody who worked for them eventually hooked up with some implacable conspiracy fomented by Warren's ex-wife and their kids, and Warren's aunts, and Warren's cousins, and possibly a maverick government agency, along with something she referred to as the Honolulu Mob, all these accountants and lawyers and insurance adjustors who wriggled through their ken ended up getting bought off, paid for false depositions, menaced into perjured testimony by threats from the Honolulu Mob. According to Mama, Warren's...

Depraved Indifference. Copyright © by Gary Indiana. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Interviews

Exclusive Author Essay
The actress Gena Rowlands once told me that her mother, citing some conundrum that had vexed her for as long as she could remember, said, "I thought I would know the answer to this by my age, but I guess there are some things I'll just never know the answer to." When I consider the subjects of my books -- not all of them, perhaps, but certainly the three most recent ones, Resentment, Three Month Fever, and Depraved Indifference -- what leaps out at me most disturbingly is that they are all really about the unanswerable question that Joan Didion so brilliantly distilled on the first page of her novel Play It as It Lays: "Why is Iago evil?"

I don't approach the problem of evil as a theological one, the way President Bush and Osama bin Laden do in their mirror rhetoric. The imputation of "evil" to competing ideologies caused most of the 20th century to become a charnel house that eradicated centuries of evolving civilization; in our new century, the ideologies wear a religious Halloween mask. Evil is "underneath" all the belief systems and social arrangements contrived to produce social order and rationalize our fear of death; it's something inside us that no map of the human genome is ever going to locate. It used to be thought that criminals had, invariably, an extra Y chromosome; I'm not sure where that theory went, but had it even been true, what's defined as a criminal in some societies doesn't apply in many others, and very few criminals are synonymous, in my mind, with "evil." Evil acts, evil attitudes are usually produced by an evil upbringing -- but evil incarnate, that's hard to drape over a country-size prison population comprised largely of small-time drug dealers and their clientele.

If evil were totally incarnate in a person, that person would be a monster, and, as monsters are not human, we could not hold this monster responsible for its actions by ordinary human measurement. We say instead that people are a mixture of good and evil, everyone with different proportions. In law there are mitigating and aggravating circumstances presented in capital cases to determine exactly how fundamentally evil the defendant may be considered. The criminal characters I've featured in my recent books have been horrifically evil at a certain moment in their lives, in the cases of Carlos and Felix Martinez in Resentment; evil for a protracted period of time in the instance of Andrew Cunanan in Three Month Fever; and in Depraved Indifference, Evangeline Slote is compulsively, grandiosely, implacably, and untiringly evil on a full-time basis. She is the logical finale to an investigation I now know I will never discover the answer to, the last installment of my trilogy. But something else, too: She embodies the allure and warped intelligence and manipulative resourcefulness of the successfully evil person, and her brazen assault on what little of the social contract remains active in our society reveals how feebly complicit and indifferent the citizens of the world's longest-running democracy have become to the criminal will to power, whether embodied in a madcap freelance grifter with a pretty face or the petroleum consortium working the glove puppet in the White House.

Why is Iago evil? I won't ever know, and neither will you. (Gary Indiana)

Editorial Reviews

This is a nasty, satirical, and often hysterical book, chronicling the fate of tremulous selfhood in the face of heedless, all-American hustle.—The Baffler—

First published in 2001, Indiana's stylish mother-and-son crime novel (the last in a trilogy) draws on the real-life con artists and murderers Sante and Kenneth Kimes to cast a jaundiced eye on the hollowness of America's capitalist culture.

—New York Times Book Review—

From the Publisher

The Barnes & Noble Review
For 30 years Gary Indiana has been cooking up caustic commentary on art and culture and anything we egocentrically characterize as "American." And paramount among our American peccadilloes is our love of the good ol' serial killer. Indiana nourishes our fascination with these devil-spawns, who often spring from the heartland, feeding us the licentious thrills we crave.

Depraved Indifference is the final installment in Indiana's American crime trilogy, which began with the 1995 release of Resentment, inspired by the infamous Menendez brothers trial. Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story neatly meshed fact and conjecture as Indiana dissected the motivations of a serial killer whose rampage might have gone unnoticed by America and the mass media if Cunanan had not punctuated it with the murder of the rich and famous Gianni Versace.

Depraved Indifference is based on the Kenneth and Sante Kimes crime spree, which culminated in the disappearance of elderly Manhattan millionairess Irene Silverman, of whose murder the Kimeses were convicted in 2000. It takes us back to the fictionalized point of origin of this apparently incestuous pair, whose plots and designs began long before they ever hit New York. "Con" -- short for both confidence game and confidence in their ability to outwit, outthink, and outmaneuver any "mark" -- is what the novel's Devin Slote aspires to and what his mother, Evangeline, cultivates: "She collected future marks like lottery tickets. She operated by reflex. Any public room she entered was a pristine harvest of human information." Short con or long, Indiana divulges the secret, weaselly machinations of these soulless grifters.

The rapid-fire barrage of dense language, released in staccato bursts from an amphetamine-primed tongue, will leave you feeling as if you've just survived America's wildest roller-coaster ride. Each twist and turn is an adrenaline thrill; afterward, you're relieved you're still alive. But as sure as America loves apple pie and deviants, you're also raring to get back in line for another ride. (Ann Kashickey)

bn.com

This is a greatly entertaining novel with dozens of passages of sharp insight and dark humor.
— Washington Post Book World

Daniel Woodrell

Any group can be an index of American change: politicians, evangelists, sports stars—or, in Indiana's new novel, gold diggers. "Baby" Claymore, an extra in Esther Williams films, marries a real-estate mogul in 1949, moves into a New York City mansion and becomes a refined hostess. Then there's Evangeline Slote: A Welcome Wagon hostess in Sacramento, California, she marries a motel builder, becomes a crooked lobbyist, pretends to be Liz Taylor, engages in insurance and mail fraud, imprisons illegal aliens in her home, commits incest with her son and, at seventy-two, tries to cheat Baby out of her valuable home. The first half of the book is a constantly entertaining, tour de force account of Evangeline's scams. Like her, Indiana is devoted to "the long con," elaborate and time-consuming schemes, but the novel's second half forces the two gold diggers together and diffuses into random satire. Indiana speaks the "vernacular of swift-moving deals," and his last pages of Evangeline pleading her innocence on Larry King Live are perfect, but not even Indiana's pith and vinegar carry the novel through its long final grift.
—Tom LeClair