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 two and 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 honor, justice, and even reality are relative concepts easily inverted by a clever attorney.
Resentment’s unifying thread is a trial: The teenaged Martinez brothers stand accused of murdering their wealthy parents in an ambush slaying, while around them swirl a discordant cast of characters posessed 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 betrayals and maledictions against each other, in a more subtle but no less destructive fashion. In a succession of careful, precise strokes, Indiana meticulously renders a portrait of a morally-malformed society whose governing principles are irrationality and amnesia, where justice is a commodity and ethical considerations an irrelevancy – a world whose denizens, poisoned by immersion in a toxic morass of glossy images, pseudo-events, and hyperkinetic impermanence, struggle to retain the vestiges of humanity. It’s hell, repainted in garish Disney colors.
Wisely avoiding the temptation to proslytize, Indiana leaves it to the reader to connect the dots between Resentment’s fiction and real-life events. While purposely-glaring parallels with the Menendez and Simpson cases abound, additional layers of possible similarity between art and life, such as the details of individual characters’ (psycho)pathologies and their role in governing human interaction, are left open to interpretation. It’s a tactic that virtually mandates reader participation in the form of thoughtful interpretation and re-interpretation throughout the book, leading in a roundabout way to Indiana’s maintaining our rapt attention.
Resentment is a fable of fin-de-siecle madness in its most acute stage, a premonitory snapshot of a moment when order and chaos, reason and insanity are locked in fights-to-the-death, the outcomes too close to call. Indiana has cleverly, cruelly drawn the blueprints for apocalypse-in-microcosm – the whimper, not the bang, which would signal that the end is near – and left it to his readers to deduce the degree to which art mirrors reality. Resentment is subtitled “a comedy,” but any laughter is only a buffer against tears and terror. The engine driving Resentment is Resentment, a bitterness at having arrived at an inescapable cul-de-sac en route to the American Dream – a frenetic, endless loop where we’re likely to claw each other to pieces, a Roach Motel for human souls.