Crimes, deviations from the norm, the transgressive actions of human animals caught in the vises of history, loneliness, desperation, lust, psychosis, exhaustion or terror — these were the subjects (some of them) of Gary Indiana’s fiction, a tremendous outpouring left unfinished after his death on Thursday at 74.
He was born Gary Hoisington in rural New Hampshire in 1950, out of place and at the wrong time, but we all have to be born somewhere. As a teenager he worked at the track, and with his small frame he aspired to be a jockey, but a growth spurt made him just a little too big to race horses.
He studied at Berkeley in the late 1960s and spent the ’70s largely in Los Angeles, a time chronicled in his brilliant memoir “I Can Give You Everything but Love” (2015). In that book he writes of driving the freeways and conducting conversations with voices in his head received as if over the radio. This was how he knew he was a writer.
After he gave himself a new name, Indiana went about inventing a life entirely original and infinitely multifarious: playwright, critic, actor, novelist and teacher. He was my generous friend for 20 years.
At the end of the ’70s, he moved to New York City and wrote plays that he staged in backyards, apartments, makeshift theaters and bars like the Mudd Club. “If you remember the Mudd Club,” he used to say, “that means you were never at the Mudd Club.”
An early mention of Indiana in The New Yorker described him as “the punk poet and pillar of Lower Manhattan society.” “Punk poet,” he told me once, “that’s how they write you off.” Now, of course, it has the ring of an honorific. The culture was always playing catch-up with Gary.
The 1980s in downtown Manhattan, and particularly the East Village: It is a time and place gauzily romanticized and constantly memorialized. Gary witnessed the terminal phase of a bohemia consumed by greed and disease, and he was an authentic survivor of that era. He lived for decades on East 11th Street in a sixth-floor walk-up, an exhausting climb even for a nonsmoker. The two of us would usually stop for a breather on the fourth flight.
He watched as his neighborhood was converted into yuppie Disneyland. He never sold out or moved to the sticks, though he spent a lot of time in borrowed houses in the south of France. He intended to return there next month to film an adaptation he’d just done, at least in his head, of a Balzac novel: one more self-reinvention left incomplete.
He became notorious as the art critic for The Village Voice in the mid-1980s, writing columns he reluctantly collected in the volume “Vile Days” (2018). As a critic, he was caustic, funny, precise, somehow merciless and humane at once, sensitive to any signs of life and intolerant of the phony. His scrutiny had the power of an acid that erodes rot and clarifies. He was an undeluded romantic.
The narrator of Indiana’s first novel, “Horse Crazy” (1989), is also an art critic for a prestigious publication, a job he loathes that makes him “an object of envy, malice and all the other base emotions that drive the majority of people at all times in every conceivable place and circumstance.” Desire and the cruelty inflicted by the beloved are the novel’s themes: The narrator is in love with a waiter who has become celibate, an artist who makes collages from porno mags. AIDS is wrecking the city and killing their friends. As the critic Tobi Haslett writes, “‘Horse Crazy’ traces the imprint of AIDS on the consciousness: its terror and humiliations, how it hardens the heart.”
As a novelist, Indiana began with autobiographical material, but the force of his talent delivered him to his major achievement, the vision of a violent America and its warped citizenry at the end of an unscripted imperial century, in his true-crime trilogy: “Resentment: A Comedy” (1997), “Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story” (1999) and “Depraved Indifference” (2001).
Beyond their major and majorly lurid subject matter, these books are triumphs of style. Indiana had an impeccable ear and an ambition to reach the limits of the way language can represent consciousness, especially in states of derangement. He returned downtown in my favorite of his novels, “Do Everything in the Dark” (2003), a portrait of East Village survivors, or “human debris,” who are now in middle age and staring down “the off-ramp of life” — as he said of himself to me last week over the phone. Its narrative ends at a gathering on Sept. 10, 2001. He knew things could always get worse.
“Politics ruins everything,” he said to me last week. I forget what we were talking about. His writings are all deeply political in the best and least obvious way, illustrative of the horrible predicament time has trapped us in. He had been sick and in treatment for cancer for years, but he was doing better the last few months and was often cheerful, making progress on a new novel and with big plans for the Balzac film.
Till the end he read books and watched films with the appetite of a precocious teenager, returning constantly to Dostoyevsky or Jean-Patrick Manchette, reading everything his many young friends wrote. A few weeks ago, the last time I saw him in person, we went to a party and had a blast. His hair looked great.
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