RESENTMENT: A Comedy (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents) - Tapa blanda

Gary Indiana's writing remains filled with so much venomous aggression that it is almost easier to ignore the flood of compassion bubbling up beneath it.... He is, I think, one of the most woefully underappreciated writers of the last 30 years.

One reads Mr. Indiana's new work with astonishment at his talent, and astonishment at the absurdist bleakness of his vision.

Gary Indiana is a fearless and valuable writer, willing to recount anything human beings are capable of with a kind of angry compassion and a spritz of disgust.

Indiana's work... is criminally underrated; ergo, is sure to be reexamined, over and over again.

In a novel capturing an era that seems at once familiar and grotesque, a New York writer lands in Los Angeles in 1994.

Originally published in 1997, Resentment was the first in Gary Indiana's now-classic trilogy (followed in 1999 by Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story and in 2003 by Depraved Indifference) chronicling the more-or-less permanent state of “depraved indifference” that characterized American life at the millennium's end.

In Resentment, Seth, a New York–based writer arrives in Los Angeles (where he has history and friends) in mid-August, 1994, to observe what will become the marathon parricide trial of the wealthy, athletic, and troubled Martinez brothers, broadcast live every day on Court TV. Still reeling from the end of his obsessive courtship of a young SoHo artist/waiter, Seth moves between a room at the Chateau Marmont and a Mount Washington shack owned by his old cab-driving, ex-Marxist friend, Jack, while he writes a profile of Teddy Wade—one of the era's hottest young actors, who has “dared” to star as a gay character in a new Hollywood film. Studded throughout with scathing satirical portraits of media figures, other writers, and the Martinez trial teams, Resentment captures an era that seems, two decades later, at once grotesque, familiar, and a precursor to our own.