The Collectors
When TV execs finally get around to producing “That ‘90s Show,” identity theft will certainly provide the theme for one episode. This particular grift--usually taking the form of stealing a person’s Social Security number and then using that identity to purchase or borrow large sums of goods and money--leaves the hapless victim not only materially poorer but with the Sisyphean task of proving to authorities that he is not who he seems to be.
To the extent that there is a plot to Gary Indiana’s latest entertainment, “Depraved Indifference,” it involves the rise and fall of one Evangeline Annamapu Thurlow Slater Carson (to use but one of her names), a woman with the bust of Liz Taylor and the nails of Leona Helmsley. “Arrested for shoplifting in 1961 in Sacramento, arraigned but released on a plea arrangement for credit card forgery in Santa Ana in 1968. She had never done time.” No wonder she catches the eye of the motel magnate, Warren Slote. “She had initiative and mobility, things Warren prized.” Besides, Warren is a drunk.
And so Evangeline marries Warren, and he begets a son, Devin, upon her. The three wade through the ‘70s with a variety of petty schemes--mortgaging homes that don’t belong to them, creating shell companies, enslaving Mexican maids. Fueled by Warren’s money, Evangeline begins to collect the identities of unwitting victims. “Any public room that she entered was a pristine harvest of human information. Not just business cards, phone numbers, fax numbers and the like, but weaknesses, quirks, character flaws, delusional ambitions, risky dreams, medical problems, shaky marriages.”
The information takes Evangeline to the Nixon White House--where she meets her match in the first lady--and to the yacht of the crooked Arab banker Sheik Ubu el-Katami, where she is nearly bankrupted by his sidekick, Hamza Kadmanites. But Evangeline survives to age into the roaring ‘90s, and Devin becomes not only her partner in crime but partner in bed. Even after Warren’s death--which she neatly conceals from the authorities and Warren’s own family--Evangeline and Devin engage in a variety of wire transfers and money drops and worse that would make a decent playbook for Al Qaeda.
The problem with “Depraved Indifference” is that identity theft is one episode for TV and thin gruel for an entire novel. Fraud requires chutzpah, but chutzpah requires feeding, and Indiana never quite finds a way to build on the initial cons of these grifters.
The denouement of the novel involves an aging millionairess named Baby Claymore--a former protegee of Esther Williams who turned her prowess in a pool into a lucrative marriage--and Evangeline’s plot to rob Baby of her house and her name. Presumably this episode is based on the grotesque con of Sante Kimes and her son Kenny, who in 1998 murdered an elderly New York matron in an attempt to defraud her of her Upper East Side townhouse. Yet it is a denouement that seems to fail to capture even Indiana’s attention. He spends much of the second half of “Depraved Indifference” on gossipy miniatures of minor characters, many of them half-hearted assassinations-a-clef, such as this riff on Tina Brown: “Teeny’s enthusiasm for the magazine was boundless, and talk about perfectionism, if she got a brainstorm she’d rip a finished issue to shreds and make them lay every page out differently the night before it went to the printer.... Franny had been a Teeny loyalist, defending her to an ever-growing number of colleagues who thought Teeny’s head should be sliced off with a chain saw and mounted on a pike on the Park Avenue meridian.” Problem is, that’s essentially the last we hear of Teeny, Franny, chain saws or the Park Avenue meridian.
Which is not to say that some of Indiana’s portraits aren’t charming and humorous. Late in the novel, we find Baby collecting tiny foreign people--like the petite Ikea, the daughter of a Tokyo pachinko parlor pooh-bah, and the Egyptian Asraboth who reads Verlaine in French to her on lazy afternoons--to create what she imagines might be a literary salon. “It was a fond dream of Baby’s to interest Ikea in Asraboth, and vice versa, partly to spare Ikea the trauma of very large men who would inevitably hit on her.... They were the same size, and Baby could visualize them gently coupling like tender lovers in a Bollywood extravaganza. She always pictured this occurring in a bassinette, and had to remind herself that they were both adults.” And Baby Claymore’s love of the operas of Janacek and sandwiches leads to a nice Wildean precis of “The Makropoulos Affair”: “Elina Makropoulos is three hundred and thirty seven years old. She has outlived countless lovers, friends, children and grandchildren, survived two dozen wars, seen empires born and die. All for what, really. A BLT.”
But as Indiana’s portraits grow, his action flags. Indeed, for all its literary aspirations, “Depraved Indifference” is more sandwich than novel, leaving the reader both hungry and indifferent.
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Jonathan Levi is a contributing writer to Book Review.