GARY INDIANA'S INHUMAN COMEDY
- Chris Millton
- Sep 2
- 14 min read
Updated: Oct 11
The Crime Trilogy
"The crime novel is the great moral literature of our era”
Jean-Patrick Manchette
Gary Indiana, who passed from lung cancer last October, aged 74, had only begun to get his due as a major figure of American letters in the last decade of his life. Before then he'd been a cult figure, dubbed by Jamaica Kincaide in 1980 as“the Punk Poet and pillar of lower-Manhattan society”. Resentment, the first in his acclaimed crime trilogy was published in 1997, followed by Three Month Fever in 1999, and Depraved Indifference in 2002, and all three novels had been out of print until Semiotexte began to reissue them in 2015 as gorgeous trade paperbacks.
Born Gary Hoising in 1950, Indiana published his first novel, Horse Crazy in 1989, but before beginning a career as a novelist he’d published two volumes of short stories, written plays, poetry, essays and reviews, been an occasional actor, and was, between 1985 and 1988, the much-feared art critic of the Village Voice (his Village Voice columns are collected in Vile Days: The Village Voice Art Columns, 1985-1988).
Indiana was a true polymath and wrote a well-received memoir, two BFI Classics, on Viridiana and Salo, several art monographs, and numerous essays on literature, contemporary art, cinema and contemporary culture, the most recent selection of these being Fire Season: Essays 1985-2021. His short book Andy Warhol and the Can that Sold the World (2010) is a small masterpiece of culture criticism and art history, and the sociopathic lack of affect he discusses in that book is not unrelated the depraved indifference that informs and drives his crime novels.
His sensibility was European, and his literary lodestars, rather than the avant-garde of his own country, were Jean-Patrick Manchette, the Sartre of Nausea, Curzio Malaparte, Patricia Highsmith (an honorary European), and his beloved Thomas Bernhard. Fielding was a favourite, often re-read author too, though the savagery of his satire is closer to Fielding’s near-contemporary Tobias Smollett in its portrayal of a society of near universal venality and imbecility, and the cruelty with which he treats his puppets, cruelty being not just Indiana’s subject, but his modus operandi.
What he wrote of his hero Thomas Bernhard, that he was “intolerant of imbeciles”, and had “an honesty practically unknown in contemporary writing”, could equally be applied to Indiana, who had a poor opinion of the writing of most of his peers, writing in a review of Barry Miles’s biography of William Burroughs that “the bulk of American fiction consists of cookie cutter, middle-class ‘problem’ novels by tenured academics and their MFA spawn, Dickensian verisimilitude courtesy of Wikipedia.” Indiana’s themes are violence, the corrupting power of wealth and it pursuit, the deadening of affect, the deranging effects of the present-day image-regime, and the “horror that is other people”. But he’s not a miserabilist, you go to Indiana for the ha ha ha, not the boo hoo hoo, albeit the laughter is in the pitch-dark.
Resentment, Three Month Fever and Depraved Indifference are based, respectively, on the real-life cases of the trial of brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez for the murder of their parents José and Kitty in 1989, the three-month killing spree of Andrew Cunanan in 1997, and the grift and murder spree of mother and son team Sante and Kenneth Kimes, that ended with their arrest in June 1998. Indiana’s friend the novelist Lynne Tillman described them as ‘documentary novels’, but there’s too much in them that’s fictive for them to be true romans a clef. Indiana wrote of his methodology: “I took the skeletons of these crimes and put flesh on them, created secondary characters more or less from scratch and altered details of the existing story to suit certain themes suggested by the original incidents but not much explored by the news coverage. In every one of those cases there was a rich family pathology that I tried to drill into to give these stories a larger dimension than what had been reported about them.”
Indiana, no fan of the “gooey psychological web of family life”, said that he thought “most parents are monstrous, most families are monstrous” and begins Resentment with an epigraph from the Philip Larkin poem This Be the Verse: “They fuck you up your Mum and dad/They may not mean to, but they do”. They can also fuck you up by fucking you. The Menendez brothers - the Martinez brothers in the novel - claimed in court that they didn’t shoot their parents because they wanted to get their hands on their inheritance early, but because they were in fear of their lives from their parents. Their bullying, domineering father José had been raping them for years, with the knowledge of the medicated, often suicidal Kitty, and the couple thought they were about to be exposed by their sons.
Indiana’s view was that the Menendez brothers had suffered sexual abuse, and there’s a long, appalling section portraying life at Chez Martinez reflecting this. On the other hand, weeks before his murder José had cut the boys out of his will following their arrest for burglarising their neighbours, and in the immediate aftermath of the murders they went on a manic spending spree. Though not monsters like their father, the brothers are nevertheless presented unsympathetically – you’d be hard put to find a single character you like in Resentment. The elder brother maintains masturbatory correspondence in prison with a fat housewife, Doris Spree, who sees their remote romance as a route to celebrity, and plans to leave her husband for him, fantasising about “a line of Doris Spree fitness products and healthy frozen meals.”
Resentment is split between accounts of the Martinez trial in Los Angeles and the peregrinations of Seth, a lonely, disgruntled journalist sent to cover the story for a New York magazine, his friend and ex-lover Jack, with whom he stays after a stint at chateau Marmont, and their friend DJ, a popular talk show host. Seth is also in LA to interview film star Terry Wade, and is recovering from an aborted romance with a younger waiter/actor back in New York (surprisingly, Wade and his wife come across as the closest to pleasant, well-adjusted people, although they’re neither pleasant nor well adjusted). Jack, a real charmer, is subject to obscenely violent sexual fantasies, and deliberately infects sexual partners with AIDS.
The novel is episodic, constructed from discrete, bravura comic set pieces, Indiana leaping from style to style, register to register, and the online sex Jack has is one of its most scabrously funny routines. The novel was written at the very beginning of online culture and social media, and before Friendster and Myspace were the chatrooms of America Online, where Jack has five online identities. From its beginning the internet has stunk of sperm and been a mass masturbation aid and social atomisation device, and Indiana clairvoyantly saw in 1997 that it was going to be the “latest thing in total alienation”.
The trial itself is recounted through witness statements, police reports, Seth’s impartations, transcripts of broadcasts, and court transcripts. One of these features a court psychiatrist suffering from multiple Tourette’s that infect the whole court: coprolalia (swearing), copropraxia (feeling the genitals and breasts), and echopraxia (repeating an interlocutor’s words). Polymath he may be, but the humour in Indiana’s novels is often broad and verging on slapstick and burlesque.
Several of the gargoyles in Resentment are based on real people: Norma Woolcote “the so-called punk novelist ... a shotgun wedding of the infantile and sublime” can only be Kathy Acker, Martin Paley, a conceptual artist who has himself publicly crucified has to be based on the now half-forgotten provocateur Sebastian Horley, and Jamaica Kincaide is mercilessly lampooned as the novelist Unguentina Caribou. Fawbus Kennedy was based on Vanity Fair writer Dominick Dunne, who in the real case, came down firmly on the side of the prosecutors, and who Indiana dismisses as “the kind of nothing this culture has been moving to for decades, a kind of aggravated and insatiable zero".
We never find out who the narrator is who incessantly says “Seth says” and narrates the outlines of the Martinez case and Seth’s life-situation at the novel’s opening, and the influence of Bernhard is evident in the recursiveness of the accounts of who said what to whom, and in the italicisation of cliches and hackneyed locutions (although this goes back to the Flaubert of Madame Bovary). Indiana has a gift, one he shares with Michel Houellebecq, for concise, skewering summation: of an era, a scene, city or psyche, and the Maritnez trial is an armature on which Indian hangs a portrait of America as a moral Wasteland dominated by “unenlightened self-interest that has pushed out most other forms of feeling” and in which psyches are "unhinged by relentless imagery where squalid abuse and tragedy become entertainment”. This portrait of the era’s psychic life includes a far from flattering portrait of LA’s homosexual demi-monde at the dawn of the AIDS crisis, a world of sad searches for connection and meaning, oblivion sought in alcohol, drugs and anonymous promiscuity. Indiana’s vision is infernal, a world where nothings fail to connect with nothings, and he’s said that the trait his demons have in common is “an inner emptiness”.
Three Month Fever, the second book in the trilogy, a sombre book sandwiched between two comedies, is an account of the life of Andrew Cunanan leading up to the three-month murder spree ending with the execution-style killing of his final victim, the designer Gianni Versace, in July 1997. Unlike the Menendez brothers, Cunanan’s parents weren’t sexual abusers, but his father was pushy and socially ambitious for him, and his mother an overprotective religious nut, his homelife as a child strange: “there is a palpable depression lodged deep in his parents’ marriage like a petrified cyst”, Indiana writes.
Three Month Fever was marketed as a true crime book on its initial release, but is too fictional to qualify as an addition to a genre that Indiana disliked and to which said he had no desire to “add one word to”, describing his book as “a pastiche” in which he would “dissolve the unsatisfying modes of the true crime and the non-fiction novel”. The book is a collage fictitious diary entries, police reports, school reports, reminiscences from childhood friends, accounts of dreams, and Cunanan's stream of consciousness, interwoven with narrative. The quality of Cunanan's descriptions and the acuity of his perceptions in his interior monologues give him a somewhat artistic consciousness and, perhaps flippantly, provocatively, Indiana commented that he found Gianni Versace to be a worse individual than Cunanan.
Affronted by the media’s creation of a “homosexual golem to absorb every scary fantasy about the gay community”, Indiana’s intention was to write beyond the sensationalistic, wildly inaccurate cable network and made-for-tv-movie version of events that portrayed Cunanan as a wannabe celebrity, high class male prostitute in love with Tom Cruise, or a man on an AIDS-revenge murder spree, writing that he “got as close as anyone could to the truth ... what I got was totally contrary to what has been reported in the media”.
The novel gives a steady, cumulative portrait of Cunanan and his decline into final despair and madness. Evil too is something one can descend into, like madness, pushed by force of circumstance, and the borders between the two are porous, overlapping, though there was always something desperate and 'off' about Cunanan. From his childhood on he was serial liar who, according to one acquaintance, was “full of shit and disreputable in some kind of hard to describe but scary way”, and throughout his life he “enlarged the little events of his life for the benefit of people who might otherwise perceive him as ordinary”.
Cunanan’s father was Filipino, and he was raised in the dismal National City, California, one of the poorest cities in America. Tortured by his mixed race and the poverty of his background, he pretended to be Jewish and, like a child, at times said he’d been adopted, “his actual home, his actual parents became a plangent secret he shared as a revealing intimacy”. The family moved several times, each time further up the social and economic ladder, ending up at La Jolla, California, where Cunanan started attending the upscale Bishop’s School. His parents not only sacrificed everything for his schooling: his father, now a stockbroker, also embezzled his employers to fund it, and later had to flee justice, back to the Philippines.
At Bishop’s Cunanan was poisoned with an obsession with wealth and status by “the proximity of rich kids, and "the moral laxity endemic amongst the monied class”. He became obsessed not with being rich, but with being thought of as rich, and “what people thought of him became more important than life itself”. This “preposterous fact”, Indiana writes, “is the purloined letter in plain sight".
The clever and gregarious Cunanan had friends, but was generally found creepy, and knew it, sensing that “suspicion and dislike of him emanated from everyone around him”. He was dating older, rich men to fund a showy lifestyle even before attending San Diego University, where he majored in American History. When he took up with the fabulously rich Norman Blachford, following humiliating stints as a clerk at a bank and assistant at the Thrifty Junior Drugstore whilst living with his mother, he began behaving like "a Deb who'd married well". He spent, and spread his largesse, extravagantly, splitting his time between travelling with Norman – who gave him a $2, 500 a month stipend – and clubbing and partying with a younger gay crowd.
With the split from Norman, he felt himself - ageing, balding, and bloating - “becoming a despised, laughable creature whose feelings mattered to one, least of all his closest friends”. Norman left him with a soon-squandered $10,000-dollar parting gift, and Cunanan began to drink heavily and get into S&M porn. His drug of choice, on top of Xanax, Vicodin and Percocet, was ball-shrinking, psychopathologising testosterone.
Cunanan ran out of money, then credit, then sanity, and the interval between shopping spree and killing spree was a short one. He’d been having a relationship with David Madson, lying constantly to him to hide his relationship with Blachford and explain away his profligate spending. Shortly before Cunanan’s break up with Norman, Madson broke free of Cunanan and moved to Minneapolis, at the same time as their mutual friend Jeff Trail, who was also trying to sever ties from the increasingly erratic and dishonest Cunanan.
Cunanan went to stay the weekend with Madson and murdered Trail in Madson’s apartment with a handgun and claw hammer, afterwards effectively keeping Madson prisoner for two days. Madson’s corpse was found a few weeks later on the shore of Rush Lake, in Minnesota. These were probably the two people Cunanan had been closest to in his life. Next, Cunanan murdered real-estate tycoon Lee Miglin in his home in Chicago. Miglin was found with his head completely encased in duct tape to form a makeshift gimp mask, and with more than 20 stab wounds from a screwdriver. Ostensibly a random break-in, it’s unlikely Cunanan didn’t know him (Miglin’s family, however, insist not). He left in Miglin’s Lexus and with $2000 in cash, by this time one of 'America’s 10 most wanted'. Cunanan then murdered cemetery caretaker William Reese, whose vehicle he stole to take him to Miami, where he murdered Gianni Versace on the steps of his mansion before fleeing to the houseboat he was holed up in, shooting himself through the mouth a week later.
Cunanan was essentially childish, a tortured narcissist full of self-hatred, a pathologically insecure man who “never gave himself the benevolent long-mirror view that would make him doubt the need for a cover story”. There’s no evidence that Cunanan was obsessed by fame or wanted to be celebrity. He wanted to be liked by everyone and to be fabulously rich without working, a not much more unreasonable thing to ask from life. Indiana, who notes the “cumulative disappointments” of Cunanan’s life, clearly has some sympathy for him, and pointedly refers to him throughout as ‘Andrew’, and this is the only thing that grates with me about the book. For in the end, whatever led him to it, which was nothing so very tragic, Cunanan savagely ripped out of life and destroyed the families of five decent men who had done him no harm.
The final novel in the trilogy, Depraved Indifference, is the funniest, and closest to a classic crime novel, Indiana’s descriptions, witty dialogue, and jaded tone having a distinctly noir feel - a rich man’s Jim Thompson. The first kaleidoscopic half of the novel, with its gleefully imagined supporting cast of comic grotesques, moves back and forth in time, each chapter headed by the name of the character it features. It recounts the cons, frauds, thefts, and grifts carried out by Devin and Evangeline Slote and, following the death of her alcoholic hotelier husband, murders, and their dealings with various victims and accomplices, willing or unwilling, the latter made up largely of the homeless, poor or addicted - ‘losers’ in Evangeline’s parlance.
Evangeline is a hugetitted Elizabeth Taylor look-alike who “collects marks like lottery tickets”. This monster, who refers to the fear and chaos she generates as her “zest for living”, is one of crime fiction’s great comic creations. Obsessed by larceny, she even goes in for petty shoplifting and steals the courtesy soap from hotels. Like Sante Kimes, she served time for enslaving and trafficking illegal migrant, Mexican maids. They’re already millionaires and don’t need money, and though Warren derives some amusement from their grifts, he’s a disreputable odd duffer in fearful thrall to Evangeline, whose “presence is like a slow acting neurotoxin.”
Implausibly, Sante Kimes was an even more outlandish psychopath than Indiana’s creation, her whole adult life a crime spree: like Evangeline, she didn’t need money and grifted for pleasure, specialising in burning down properties to claim the insurance. As a child she was a pyromaniac who tortured cats, dogs, goats, and her younger sister. Like Evangeline, she had a rich hotelier husband, she had 22 fake identities, and was lover to not just her son, but also her brother (Evangeline’s ‘seduction’ of Devin in one of the book’s queasiest scenes).
The first half of the book ends with Warren’s extraordinary dying interior monologue as he succumbs to an aneurism. He’s fixed it so that Evangeline can’t touch his money, and it goes to the children of his first marriage. In the novel’s second half Evangline and Devin try and fail to withdraw Warren’s money from his offshore accounts, and the insurance money from a property they have burned down, along the way murdering a lawyer, an insurance salesman and a bank auditor.
Even as the police are hunting for them, they try to appropriate the ownership of an Upper East Side Beaux Arts mansion by forging deeds and assuming the owner’s identity – after knocking her off. The house is owned by the elderly ’Baby’ Claymore, a former Esther Williams ‘aquabat’ who married well and runs the house as an apartment complex for the arty super-rich, who don’t escape Indiana’s gimlet satirical eye. Devin moves in under an alias, covertly visited by a preposterously disguised Evangline, but the pair are arrested shortly after they murder Claymore’s and dispose of her body. Following the long description of the genteel, cultured and sheltered daily life Claymore lives in the mansion the sudden irruption of madness, violence and nihilism is shocking. In the Kimes case it was 82-year-old socialite and former ballerina Irene Silverman they targeted, and her body has never been found.
Although the novel ends with Evangeline being interviewed on the Larry King show, Indiana's target here isn’t the media but the centrality of the con to American life (it’s worth looking up Kimes’s real interviews with King and others on YouTube, her performances are extraordinary). At one point Evangeline justifies herself to Warren with “I love America, but you have to admit it’s full of morons. We owe it to ourselves to make money off them”. This is really no different what you might hear in many-a corporate boardroom, and is the guiding ethos of the advertising industry.
In an interview, a friend of Irene Silverman’s who attended their trial described Sante and Keneth Kimes as completely empty, “bodies without souls”, bespeaking the confluence of inner emptiness and evil. Claymore, shortly before being murdered has the letters of Madame de Sevigne read to her by her factotum, and these, testimonies to filial affection and fullness of being, are held up as a moral foil to the depraved indifference that rules the psyche of Evangeline and, by extension, the nation. It was these same letters that Proust held up as an index of his grandmother’s, and so of all possible goodness, in In Search of Lost Time, and Indiana segues into quotes from letters by other literary figures, such as Kafka and Arendt, reflecting: “of course, people no longer wrote them, or no longer with depth and reflection, life moved too quickly now, and parts of the human heart seem to have atrophied in the species as a whole”. Indiana, a severe and unforgiving moralist, once wrote with uncharacteristic near-optimism that “empathy can, in fact, change the world”, and it’s the smothering of empathy, the atrophying of the human heart, and what causes it to wither that is the subject of Indiana's trilogy of parables.
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