I Did Not Know Gary Indiana

Evan Grillon remembers the legendary writer Gary Indiana.

By Evan GrillonOctober 31, 2024

• Fiction

• Nonfiction

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. That if Republicans just read two pieces of literary fiction a year, our republic would be saved. Perhaps we should call Mr. Bernstein Bubble Boy. Just as we’re sold a fantasy of comfort and unimaginable wealth and happiness by the culture at-large, so our literary culture at-large promises us that, in the end, we’re all human beings with dignity, and that there is hope.

Moral refuge is precisely what Indiana withheld in his oeuvre because in real life it is withheld from so many. The desire for a happy ending, a moment of relief and rectitude and respite in our literature, for our media to be an oasis, is a desire for opiates. It is the desire manufactured by a culture that wants to be told that it is righteous, and that in the end, everything is going to be okay. To quote Tobi Haslett in his essay “Modern Love” for n+1, “To read Indiana is to feel a bit bovine; the reserves of optimism we deploy to make the world bearable are suddenly revealed as a shameful indifference to things as they are.”

The United States has at regular intervals experienced cataclysmic throes of decompensation since its inception. The next one might be its last. The logic of a nation built on free market economics and slave labor, a farce of a republic masquerading as a democracy that will always hand the advantage to the very worst people, a culture of grievance and entitlement: There is refuge only for a select few because that is, by and large, what the people want. The source of the majority of the suffering in this country and elsewhere, after all, is not the fact that the poorest don’t have enough, but that those who have plenty will not stop until they have more. (Indiana’s view of the big picture, to quote his memoir, was “a world of slaves forced to eat shit by large, unattractive men.”) At this point in capitalism’s trip across the River Styx, a rabid (and significant) portion of the American electorate has been spoiled to the point of sociopathy. In a country that is split on whether we should put immigrants into concentration camps, suffice to say that the demagogues of grievance and narcissism, who have always been powerful, need not even bother to dissemble anymore. Meanwhile, the engine of consumption is fed ever more souls. Moloch to Mickey Mouse: To quote Indiana quoting Robert Stone, “Mickey Mouse will see you dead.” And with Disney’s cultural choke hold, I suppose it has seen him dead.

Gary Indiana saw this coming. This being his death, yes, but also that the bad times would roll like heads. There is a void where America’s heart should be, the safety net is riddled with holes and situated above a shark tank, and Americans don’t want for their fellow human beings to be protected and cared for—they want the right to step on their necks on their way up the golden ladder. There is a reason the phrase “fait accompli” appears again over and over in his literature. As far as he is concerned, most lives are a fait accompli, and for some, it takes the form of a black hole of violence, depredation, and cruelty. He understood this before most, such that works like 2005’s Schwarzenegger Syndrome: Politics and Celebrity in the Age of Contempt practically predicted Donald Trump’s ascendance and the liberal establishment’s rightward drift. The book closes presciently: “If the existence of persistent, principled, rationalist resistance to barbarism ceases to be the case in the time ahead of us, the world will belong to any tyrant who claims it.”

Anyone who cares about the truth should grieve his loss, and one truth is that I do not feel myself up to the task of properly eulogizing him, and I feel this so much so that, in order to eulogize him, I will quote his eulogy of Anna Politkovskaya from his essay “I Did Not Know Anna Politkovskaya”:

Politkovskaya was believed, even by some who despised her, because she really did write only what was true. Not just reporting parts of the truth that happened to serve her parti pris, but also complicating facts, mitigating causalities, the “yes, but …” that even well-intentioned people quite often omit from their account of things. What happens when your idea of the truth is whatever evidence fits is this: inevitably, the little thing you left out to sound more convincing will eventually surface, and even though it is a small thing, your decision to leave it out will make this little thing bigger than the big thing you were trying to reveal. The same is true of exaggerations: the fudged figure, the inflated injury, the overdrawn malfeasance inevitably makes the world a little worse.

It’s exactly these qualities that drew me to Indiana’s work. He never represses, never disguises or dissembles. He describes life not as it is, because there is no one universal experience, but life as bad as it can get. I cannot speak to whether he was a hypocrite or cruel person in his real life, but he frequently was criticized by reviewers and contemporaries for his lack of tact, his willingness to lambast those whose writing he disliked, as well as those he simply disliked personally. Susan Sontag, David Lynch, Hilton Als—these are just a few who have been stung by him. And of course, in a culture where rhetoric has been made falsely equivalent to real, physical violence, where it is worse to call someone a name or use the word “genocide” than it is to actually slaughter real live human beings, where decency means not stepping out of line rather than doing the right thing, it makes sense that Indiana struggled to find his work a permanent home for so long. And lest anyone have the idiotic idea to suggest he did it to make a career for himself, it’s worth remembering that it pays far better to be nice than it does to be perceived as an enfant terrible. To trade favors, to write favorable reviews of your friends, in our literary culture, is to make your way. Indiana wouldn’t do that.

I get to everything late. I read Indiana for the first time as a member of a Twitter-born book club while I was wrapping up my MFA at a program I’ll dub “the peninsula of misfit toys,” chaired at that time by a writer most famous for being publicly accused of plagiarism in The New York Times and for being dubbed “fuckwad” by David Foster Wallace, whom Indiana wings with a one-line shot in Resentment. Haslett has composed a better summary and analysis of Indiana’s work and its relationship to love and nihilism than I could. Ryan Ruby has written a terrific review for Sidecar of Indiana’s newest selected essays anthology. Joshua Cohen and Christian Lorentzen both gave him a goodbye in The Paris Review.

For all the remarks on his acerbity, his witticism, his style and disdain for the US and capitalism, Indiana also had a profound sense of the loneliness and heartbreak that pushes so many over the edge. It’s at least in part being left (along with a murderous contempt for others) that drives Andrew Cunanan kill Jeffrey Trail in Three Month Fever (1999). And Indiana’s characters who are not psychopaths can never do enough, they are not there for each other, they say or do the wrong thing at precisely the wrong time. And carried in each of these moments is the possibility that they may have done the right thing, that there is a right thing to do. His narrator (named Gary Indiana) in Do Everything in the Dark (2003) remarks: “I never have the right words. I never can save anybody.”

These individual failures mirror the failures of our society and culture at-large. Indiana’s crime trilogy addresses, as do his essays and early novels, what I think of as his primary hobbyhorse: rather than a “crisis of mental illness” or a “gun epidemic,” what has created a culture of rage and violence in the United States is, to take one of his titles, a depraved indifference on the part of the overall culture to the torrential rainstorm of shit, of violence and depredation, that’s constantly pouring down on the heads of the people situated at the margins of our society. His essay on the Tsarnaev brothers’ bombing of the Boston Marathon contains the most succinct description of his views on the matter: “Why did they do it? How could they? In the world we live in now, the better questions are: Why not? Why wouldn’t they?” The fact is that alongside the deranged killers our culture has long pretended to be baffled by are millions of sociopaths living in disguise, asking themselves the same question, “Why not?,” but with giddiness rather than despair. To quote him just one more time:

As everyday existence becomes more punitive for all but the monied few, more and more frustrated, volatile individuals will seek each other out online, aggravate whatever lethal fairy tale suits their pathology, and, ultimately, transfer their rage from the screen world to the real one.

There’s no doubt that people love a little cruelty in their literature, a little perversion. It’s when the perversion gets cruel that people start to get uncomfortable. When that cruelty could plausibly be perpetrated by the reader, by the reader’s friends and family, when that cruelty is visited upon people who don’t deserve it, and there is no moment of epiphanic empathizing and change—then the reader is reminded that their safety, their happiness, their life is an accident of a society that chews up as many as necessary to make the lucky ones safe and happy.