“We live in a time when bad things happen so frequently, to so many people, that it’s an entire vocation to keep up with the bad news.” Thus ends Gary Indiana’s Horse Crazy (1989), a novel about a dysfunctional relationship set during the AIDS epidemic. The author’s achievements, before his death at the age of just 74, deserve celebration – lest the occurrence become more bad news.
My friend, the writer Holly Connolly, introduced me to Indiana’s work in 2021. I devoured everything I could find by him in the years following—the interviews, the art reviews, the political essays. Something about the ironic detachment in his prose style, a certain snide “well obviously,” about how people treat one another was like a cold, hard slap round the face. One that I needed. His work helped me adjust to the reality of the post-pandemic world, and accept that cruelty is one of its defining characters—from top to bottom.
Born in 1950 in Derry, New Hampshire, to parents who had “scrabbled into the lower middle class,” Indiana started studying at UC Berkeley in 1967. He dropped out after a couple of weeks. Re-directing his education, he befriended various radicals and artists doing LSD in the park (also finding time to read Marx and the Frankfurt School with his friend Ferd Eggan). In 1978 he moved to New York and started making experimental theatre with the artists and weirdos of the East Village, writing plays titled things like Alligator Girls go to College and Curse of the Dog People. John Heys and Cookie Mueller starred as Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate in his The Roman Polanski Story, performed for six nights at the Wooster Group’s Performing Garage (NYC) in 1980.
In 1985 Indiana joined the Village Voice as one of its art critics, working there until 1988. These reviews sharpened the scalpel for which he became notorious: “One can admire Gilbert and George for the artlessness of their art,” he wrote on June 4th 1985. His other writing topics? High and low. Across his essay collections you’ll find Bertold Brecht and Brokeback Mountain, Barbara Kruger and Madonna, Adorno and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“The world of the heterosexual is a sick and boring life,” Divine roars in Pink Flamingos. Like John Waters or Fassbinder before him, or contemporaries such as David Wojnarowicz, Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, and Brett Easton Ellis, there’s a queer disposition of diagnosing from the outside looking in across Indiana’s work. In I Can Give You Anything But Love (2015), his autobiography, he recounts his early experiences of homophobic violence. And in Three Month Fever (1999) he wrote that “The homosexual is uniquely equipped to discover what truly belongs and doesn't belong in the sewer.” Never very interested in playing doctor, his work portrayed the sicknesses of wealth and the consequences of its absence across society – staring at the derangement of heterosexuals. And everyone else.
It is his novels for which he was perhaps best known. Resentment (1997), Three Month Fever, and Depraved Indifference (2001) – a crime trilogy written across the late nineties – each take high profile US murder cases as their focus, heavily dramatising these events as a way into American malady. They are, I think, among the greatest works of fiction of our age.
Resentment takes on Lyle and Erik Menendez, two brothers who disposed of their wealthy parents, focusing on the media spectacle of the ‘Martinez brothers’ from the perspective of a magazine writer, Seth, who becomes obsessed with the trial. Three Month Fever gets inside the psyche of Andrew Cunanan, a sociopathic homosexual who goes on a killing spree ending with the notorious shooting of Gianni Versace. Depraved Indifference is based on Sante Kimes, who murders her real estate mogul husband and then enters into a sexual relationship with her son – the characters morphed into Evangeline and Devin Slote. “Evangeline referred to those years of happy scams as the honeymoon era.” Indiana’s criminals are not the saintly erotic thieves of Jean Genet. They are symbols of American rot.
In Resentment, “The cavernous courthouse lobby” is a grim purgatory in which the immiserated elements of society meet:
Armies of losers swarm over the floor’s starburst pattern of pink and obsidian marble. Defendants in small, bailable criminal suits. Central Americans trapped in interminable INS hearings. Jailhouse lawyers with faulty hairpieces, bondsmen in poorly cut suits, aggrieved persons with no money whatsoever dressed in the national prole style … Hysterics coping on Prozac … People driven half-mad and bankrupt by small, malignant lesions in the social contract …
Even though presented in the form of a novel, it’s clear that Indiana makes these observations after visits to these really existing places. He looked at court records for each of the crime trilogy and even interviewed officers who’d investigated the cases.
Each novel in the crime trilogy is an improvement on the last. And for me, Depraved Indifference is Indiana’s best work. But what was it about crime that so fascinated the writer? It is in Horse Crazy that this interest first emerged:
Ted struck everyone who knew him as an all-American, even when he’d completely run out of control, sometimes murdering two women at the same time, abducting one and tying her up somewhere, driving off and finding another, then raping and killing the first one in plain sight of the second, who then would be raped and murdered in turn, or running amok in a women’s dormitory with a baseball bat, cracking in the skulls of as many women as he could locate. Such is the ambience of American society, that a person who runs out of control in this manner can effortlessly impress those he meets as a paragon of desirable national qualities.
Here we see Indiana’s typical balance of control and tonal detachment. The narrator describes six photos of Ted Bundy on the wall of his lover Gregory’s apartment. In these descriptions we see what Indiana later terms a “genuine American archetype” (‘Disneyland Burns’). Bundy is a “golden boy”, “college preppie”, an “exemplary neighbor.” He looks as all-American as Mickey Mouse, but he’s a monster.
By foregrounding crime, Indiana’s fiction aims at the disenchantment of social reality, by revealing that violence is the ambience of the nation, the one in which character is constructed in the same way that you might put on a Donald Duck costume and go to work at Disneyland. No matter how virtuous you are or try to be, all your attempts to live a good life exist alongside acts of corruption, extortion, rape and murder – all things that bourgeois reality denies. Such a world should disgust us. Indiana even locates this disgust in Disney characters, finding there: “a creeping fear of idiocy or irreversible insanity that might be brought on by ‘giving in’ to the universe these characters inhabit.”
In Depraved Indifference, Evangeline and Devin Slote bludgeon a man to death with a hammer while at sea on their yacht. After the pair dispose of the body and remove blood stains from the boat with bleach, we’re told that: “Evangeline later observed that it would have been twice as much bother if they’d had to drug him at Fathoms instead of the Ocean Club.”
After 9/11, Indiana escaped New York for Cuba, sleeping with beautiful young men and enjoying a world yet to be destroyed by technology: “No New York Times. No high-speed internet. No Desperate Housewives of Atlanta, no American Idol, no Dancing with the Stars, no Kardashians, no Donald Trump, no Tea Party, no NRA, no Rite Aid, no Chase Bank, no Merrill Lynch, no Goldman Sachs.” (I Can Give You Everything But Love, 2015). Technology. Commodity. Credit. Entertainment. Stupidity. For Indiana, these are the exports of the American empire.
Importantly, this critique was often delivered with deviant humour. In the late 80s he called Donald Trump “a subnormal real estate doofus.” Reviewing Eurodisney in 1994, he wrote: “If I ran an amusement park, there would be real pirates and gypsies and an authentic criminal element on hand to supply a sense of risk.”
Whether manic or depressive, his work often attended to the neurotic twitches of the psyche: “My solitude has the fatal ugliness of wanting,” exclaims the narrator of Horse Crazy – laying bare the distance between desire and fulfilment that obsessed Indiana. He filled this gap with tragicomic laughter: characters are marionettes soaked in the nectar of capital, stumbling around sick or mad, falling back into their bad habits and addictions. There’s no space for easy comforts in Indiana’s oeuvre. In his post 9-11 novel Do Everything in the Dark, the main character Jesse travels around the world, putting himself in constant danger only to be a victim of violence back in New York. Narrative relief in Indiana is the quick jab in the kidney or discovering you’ve been being spiked.
Indiana was more modernist than post-modern: committed to originality, disgusted by repetition, suspicious of success. In a piece titled ‘Ackerville’, written for the London Review of Books in 2006, he wrote of his friend Kathy Acker that “She wrote too much,” arguing that her cut-up experiments continued long after she ran out of ideas. Accordingly, in an era bereft of newness, his fiction shaped the excesses of the individual and society into something both monstrous and laughable, resulting in disgust. In Depraved Indifference, the perspective shifts from Evangeline Slote to her Argentine housekeeper Norma:
She had not known a single Argentine who had not had someone close to them disappeared … If they were pregnant women they were taken to concentration camps until they gave birth. The babies were given to barren Army couples, the mothers flown out over the Rio Plata and tossed from helicopters. A lot of it had come out in the years where Norma was away, but the ones who did it weren’t punished. Every street in Buenos Aires teemed with ghosts, and with torturers in three-piece suits who now managed companies and brokered real estate. Norma had come to New York to escape all that sadness and quiet horror. She now understood that this was because it was a place without memory.
At the end of Depraved Indifference, Indiana reveals how people disappear, not just how the rich disappear into their disbeliefs and fantasies, but how South Americans get thrown from helicopters. Just as the CIA trained la contrarrevolución, the Dirty War resonates inside the house of Slote, an American woman who has murdered her millionaire husband and embezzled his fortune. Indiana takes the construction of American myths and knocks them down. The cartoonish narcissism of wealth gets inflated then punctured by social reality.
Flaubert once said that his readers didn’t deserve his novels because “the public wants books that exalts its illusions.” Much contemporary fiction is absorbed in myth making: meritocracy, opportunity, psychic coherency—even as the bombs rain down. It is any element of the bourgeois subject and its desires, wriggling naked on the table, drunk on its own exaltations and insecurities, that Indiana nailed down and dissected. Our literary world will continue to inflate itself in pursuit of sales, funded by arms companies and their investors. Thankfully we have the tools of Indiana to deflate it.
Gary Indiana is one of the most important writers of the last half a century because he demolished everything that our era worships. He is nihilistic because he is truthful. And from both these elements spring his humour. But like all serious artists, from Flaubert to Claire Denis, among all this impossibility and imperialism there is a tenderness, still. Alongside all the monsters, his novels are full of good people trying to love one another, finding intimacy and connection in spite of the madness. Call it the compulsion to keep on fighting for what you love. A condemnation to romanticism, despite what you know to be true. Rest in Peace Gary Indiana, may more people discover your work and draw strength from it.