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Depraved Indifference
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.
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.
- GenresFictionNovelsLiterature
336 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1969
5 people are currently reading
736 people want to read
About the author
Gary Indiana
73 books181 followersGary Hoisington, known as Gary Indiana, was an American writer, actor, artist, and cultural critic. He served as the art critic for the Village Voice weekly newspaper from 1985 to 1988. Indiana is best known for his classic American true-crime trilogy, Resentment, Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story, and Depraved Indifference, chronicling the less permanent state of "depraved indifference" that characterized American life at the millennium's end. In the introduction to the recently re-published edition of Three Month Fever, critic Christopher Glazek has coined the phrase 'deflationary realism' to describe Indiana's writing, in contrast to the magical realism or hysterical realism of other contemporary writing.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
November 9, 2024
brutal, ugly, difficult to read and impossible to stop reading. like The Grifters with more incest and so much check kiting. gave me vertigo at times - this is what i wanted John Waters’ Liarmouth to be.
July 23, 2014
Well written and fun to read. Unexpectedly depraved characters!
June 28, 2024
True crime is boring. It's formulaic, traffics in intimate pain, and exposes its subjects – both perpetrators and their victims – to public judgment and ridicule. Gary Indiana turns the clichés of true crime on its head, transforming the story of real-life fraudster-murderers into a captivating fictional tale.
The bare bones of the plot are there: A mother-"father"-son crime trio hangs paper, steals social security numbers, cheats old ladies out of their property, and preys on a network of homeless people, immigrants, and addicts to do their dirty work. They race up and down across the West Coast, jet to Hawaii and the Bahamas, and wiggle through New York, staying a few steps ahead of the insurance companies and the even more pathetic cops as they lie, cheat, and steal their way through 90s America. Even death won't stop them in their quest for... wealth? prestige? satiety? It's not clear if they even have a goal, but the story is rough, funny, and tragic in the right amounts. Especially tragic for me was Indiana's voluminous vocabulary, which kept me with my dictionary app by my side (and constantly peppering nearby friends to do my dirty work for me), as I racked my brain for the definition of "obsequious" and dozens of other rare jewels.
But where Indiana succeeds is through his mastery of perspective and perception. He worms deep into the minds of his characters, unearthing their most embarrassing thoughts and actions. There is nothing heroic about these people, just as there are no real heroes in our lives. Everyone has debased thoughts, past actions that they would rather forget, and complicated relationships with their most beloved friends and family. These are the things that keep us up at night – and that we think we tell no one. But we hint at our insecurities in our mannerisms, our speech patterns, and our silences. Indiana reminds us that it's easier to get into someone's head (and their pocketbook) than we think. We're all vulnerable and needy, and the sudden appearance of a brilliant and beautiful charmer is sometimes all that separates us from a series of bad decisions with dangerous consequences. In the train wreck of contemporary America, we're just one misstep away from disaster.
PS: Read Three Month Fever, Indiana's fictionalized retelling of the murder of Versace. I promise it's better than any TV show or documentary.
The bare bones of the plot are there: A mother-"father"-son crime trio hangs paper, steals social security numbers, cheats old ladies out of their property, and preys on a network of homeless people, immigrants, and addicts to do their dirty work. They race up and down across the West Coast, jet to Hawaii and the Bahamas, and wiggle through New York, staying a few steps ahead of the insurance companies and the even more pathetic cops as they lie, cheat, and steal their way through 90s America. Even death won't stop them in their quest for... wealth? prestige? satiety? It's not clear if they even have a goal, but the story is rough, funny, and tragic in the right amounts. Especially tragic for me was Indiana's voluminous vocabulary, which kept me with my dictionary app by my side (and constantly peppering nearby friends to do my dirty work for me), as I racked my brain for the definition of "obsequious" and dozens of other rare jewels.
But where Indiana succeeds is through his mastery of perspective and perception. He worms deep into the minds of his characters, unearthing their most embarrassing thoughts and actions. There is nothing heroic about these people, just as there are no real heroes in our lives. Everyone has debased thoughts, past actions that they would rather forget, and complicated relationships with their most beloved friends and family. These are the things that keep us up at night – and that we think we tell no one. But we hint at our insecurities in our mannerisms, our speech patterns, and our silences. Indiana reminds us that it's easier to get into someone's head (and their pocketbook) than we think. We're all vulnerable and needy, and the sudden appearance of a brilliant and beautiful charmer is sometimes all that separates us from a series of bad decisions with dangerous consequences. In the train wreck of contemporary America, we're just one misstep away from disaster.
PS: Read Three Month Fever, Indiana's fictionalized retelling of the murder of Versace. I promise it's better than any TV show or documentary.
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August 12, 2023vibed w/ this on, like, a molecular level. scornful as christina stead, pugnacious as ellroy, word-drunk as a. theroux, spookily immersive as vollmann. plus imo you can draw more or less a straight line from the homer & langley collyer warren of quitclaims, shell corps, DBAs, phony IDs, etc that evangeline constructs around herself & those pix of top secret docs piled in a mar-a-lago bathroom, or clarence thomas gobbling yumyums from this or that hyperwealthy benefactor. improbably, wonderfully, there are still favorites to be discovered @ this late hour. keep on reading folks
September 19, 2023
Weird… very weird… who are all these people…
December 7, 2022
A blackly comic novel about a family of con artists, all of whom are terrible people. Nothing but fun stuff.
June 30, 2025
Read this trilogy out of order, and now have to go back to Cunanan.
Book 1 of this trilogy took its time exploring the media whirl around the Menendez brothers, all the profiteers and hangers-ons and smug commentators. Book 3, by comparison, seems honed in on the Kimes themselves and their coterie of victims. Real compassion for Warren and Devin while still showing the full brunt of their crimes; same with all the poor fucks who get co-opted and manipulated into taking all their falls. Indiana writes ugly well. Appreciated the reappearance of certain bit characters (Morgan Talbot).
Longer review to come after Book 2!
Book 1 of this trilogy took its time exploring the media whirl around the Menendez brothers, all the profiteers and hangers-ons and smug commentators. Book 3, by comparison, seems honed in on the Kimes themselves and their coterie of victims. Real compassion for Warren and Devin while still showing the full brunt of their crimes; same with all the poor fucks who get co-opted and manipulated into taking all their falls. Indiana writes ugly well. Appreciated the reappearance of certain bit characters (Morgan Talbot).
Longer review to come after Book 2!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 26, 2018
adept satire
February 17, 2020
Sadly his name is not really Gary Indiana. Nor is he from Indiana. He sure likes using "c**t" in his novel.
August 30, 2022
up until warren dying kinda dragged for me. afterward tho that kettle just got hotter and hotter den it done boiled over, mr gary sure can write .
July 24, 2024
My personal favorite of Gary Indiana's true crime trilogy. I wish HBO would pick it up for a mini series. It'd be grand. Exceptional work.
August 14, 2025
boy oh boy
June 16, 2009
One of the three novels Indiana has written that are based on true crime events. He has an incredible vocabulary and is a great story teller. I'm loving this.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews