Resentimiento

by Gary Indiana

Gary Indiana's savage comedy of manners opens with a grisly, intimate double murder and quickly fans out through the boulevards and freeways of a twilight world where self-mutilation is an art form and casual sex easily blurs into casual killing: a world where resentment lies at the root of everything. Resentment chronicles a murder trial that might have been dreamed by Lewis Carroll, simultaneously tracking the damaged yet strangely charmed lives of an embittered journalist, a drive-time radio DJ, a stalking victim and her movie star husband, a taxi driver with AIDS, and a burnt-out soap opera actress and her mentally unbalanced son. A multitextured probe of both public spectacle and private catastrophes, Resentment startles us with flashes from an epic judicial battle and its sway over our collective imagination while charting the extreme particularity of human misery.