Evan Grillon at the LARB:
LAST FALL, I was rereading Resentment: A Comedy (1997) on the train on the way to a screening of Sweet Smell of Success (1957), the most perverted Hays Code movie I know, and came upon a passage I knew was coming, where a man is, to put it mildly, fisted to death by the novel’s stuttering psychopath. I began to feel physically ill. I made it through an hour of Sweet Smell before having to head home because I was still feeling ill. Probably it was just something I ate, I told myself, willfully ignoring how deeply the viciousness, the casual cruelty Indiana put on display, had scared me.
It is moments like that fatal fisting which probably led Richard Bernstein (whoever that is), in a contemporary review of the novel, to write: “Mr. Indiana’s total immersion in the Gothic elements of the psychic tapestry provides us with no moral refuge.” I’m not exactly sure what a moral refuge is, but I’m sure it entails somehow being told that nothing is, in the end, your fault, and that we’re all human, and that kindness and empathy will save us.
more here.
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