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Review [published September 1997]
Gary Indiana: Resentment
David B. Livingstone
Historically, the turn of centuries and millenniums
have marked periods of heightened popular anxiety,
social unrest, collective madness, and religious mania.
From the vantage point of 1997, a little less than twoand-a-half
years from two-thousand-zero-zero, our
own age seems little different: Heaven’s Gaters are
hopping aboard Hale-Bopp, militia types are scanning
the skies for black helicopters, and millions of people
inexplicably watch Jenny Jones daily. It’s getting to be
a pretty weird world.
And it’s hard to imagine a more fertile breeding
ground for modern insanity than the supercharged, chaotic
maelstrom of greater Los Angeles, as intensified
and re-imagined in Resentment. Equal parts courtroom
drama, existential lament, and blacker-than-black
comedy, author Gary Indiana’s latest offering might
mark the first entry in a new genre: Post-Simpson Trial
fiction, a realm where brutality transforms effortlessly
into bland, mildly-diverting mass entertainment, and
where honour, justice, and even reality are relative
concepts easily inverted by a clever attorney.
Resentment’s unifying thread is a trial: The teenaged
BUY Gary Indiana books online from and
Martinez brothers stand accused of murdering their
wealthy parents in an ambush slaying, while around
them swirl a discordant cast of characters possessed
of varying degrees of spiritual and moral decay. Seth,
the self-serving New York reporter in town to cover
the trial; Jack, his taxi-driver ex-lover, slowly dying
of AIDS; Frankie, the narcissistic, Cunanenesque
hustler; Potter Phlegg, the manipulative, exploitative
psychologist; Cassandra, the washed-up soap opera
actress; JD, a vapid drive-time radio host – all abrade
against each other, collide with one another in an
exquisitely choreographed ballet of mutually-assured
destruction performed to an accompaniment of lies
and vacant smiles.
While Resentment’s characters gradually grind one
another into dust, the Martinez’ show/trial spirals to
dizzying heights of absurdity as careerist attorneys and
psychotic judges jockey for power, a struggle chronicled
in chillingly-real torrents of self-negating legalese
nonsense. Simultaneously, the violence of the brothers’
crime compounds itself as Indiana’s circle of misfits
begin, usually unconsciously, to act out the same be-
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