The Shanghai Gesture

by Gary Indiana

In the internationally acclaimed author’s first novel since Do Everything in the Dark, Gary Indiana applies his prickly wit, nihilistic vision, and utterly original voice to this side-splitting spin on Fu Manchu.

A mysterious bout of narcolepsy has overtaken the seaside hamlet of Land’s End, a funk endemic to the region since the wreckage a century earlier of the ship the Ardent Somdomite. Inspector Weymouth Smith and unconvinced cohort Dr. Obregon Petrie attempt to thwart Fu Manchu’s latest ploy for world domination while confronting South American Piyas, matching wits with a club-footed ex-Stasi, as well as battling the latest technological crazes and their own drug dependencies.

The Shanghai Gesture is not a genre farce, but a compelling tale that merges the author’s trademark eye for social satire with the beautifully poetic sensibilities of his previous novels.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Mystery

207 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2009

About the author

Gary 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.

Reviews

[Gabriel]

Somehow, this book was just what I was looking for. Wildly uneven, cliched, and only "literary fiction" through the name on the cover, Indiana's new novel is a brilliant, gleaming Tinguely machine, an antidote to all of the frail, mindless, simpering literature blackening the skies above us, gathering like locusts to devour all capacity to think clearly about the world around us while promising to deliver that world to us.

It is everything, all at once, in a huge hurry: Edwardian boy's adventure, Arthur Conan Doyle mystery, Dick science fiction, Lovecraft horror, Doc Benway drug novel, McCarthy road novel, blender hybrid, and satire of all such hybrids. It is Burroughs with an editor, Kathy Acker on one of her lucid days, and very nearly brighter than either. I mean shimmering. Indiana's unbelievable velocity never slows, never gives way to demands for character development or plot resolution. He piles incident upon incident, like a junkyard of wrecked cars, until the piles teeter and threaten the reader speeding along between them with their incalculable steel weight and wrenched sharp edges.

Plus, it's funny.

[Angus McKeogh · Rating 4 out of 5]

A hidden gem. I really liked this book. Such a quirky story and style. I do recall the first 26 pages being rough. Exposition setting the stage with overly florid language. But then the point of view switched to the characters and the story just took off from there. Very close to 5 stars for me.

[Taffy · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a querky, challenging, fun read! I reread a number of passages just to enjoy the impossibly wonderful description and flow of text. Could this Indiana and Dylan share a brain wave?
A reference in today's New Yorker blog is well worth checking out:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs...
Thanks to the choices made by publishing indies like Eric Obenauf of Two Dollar Radio, we readers still have access to great reads such as "The Shanghai Gesture".

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gary Indiana had to resort to magic realism to say all the things we're not supposed to say, in a good way, not in an idiotic tired grasp at transgression - i mean we are REALLY not supposed to say these truths we hold to be self evident. After all, "An enemy is just a friend you don't know really well yet" - oh he is the best and so awful at politicking in the U.S. literary world that many shall never know it.

[kim McRad · Rating 2 out of 5]

the vocabulary was fantastic, not very often i need to keep a dictionary within reach. the story itself i found a little slow and confusing...