Gone Tomorrow

by Gary Indiana

a novel, "amazingly perverse, savagely amusing"

Genres: Fiction, Queer, LGBT, Audiobook, Gay Fiction, Film, Contemporary

252 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Gary Hoisington, known as Gary Indiana, was an American writer, actor, artist, and cultural critic. He served as the art critic for the Village Voice weekly newspaper from 1985 to 1988. Indiana is best known for his classic American true-crime trilogy, Resentment, Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story, and Depraved Indifference, chronicling the less permanent state of "depraved indifference" that characterized American life at the millennium's end. In the introduction to the recently re-published edition of Three Month Fever, critic Christopher Glazek has coined the phrase 'deflationary realism' to describe Indiana's writing, in contrast to the magical realism or hysterical realism of other contemporary writing.

Reviews

[Glenn Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

"We arrived in Cartagena. Palms lined the sidewalks, fronds half-brown from dessication. A glass-and-steel cakebox palace, its flag-lined plaza adrool with fountains, floated on the black water of the marina. Human figures crowded the esplanade, which had the look of a perpetual carnival. There were wagons selling boiled peanuts and ices, wheeled steam tables, people in straw hats and sandwich boards hawking lottery tickets, balloons, grotesquely fat women working the crowd with trays of smashed coconuts and sliced papaya balanced on their heads, refugees from a Botero paiinting."

Much of Gone Tomorrow is set in this sweltering city on the northern coast of Colombia.

My first acquaintance with Gary Indiana was back in the 1980s when the New York City East Village art scene exploded with defiant, hopped up energy. I read the author's collection of short stories, Scar Tissue, and was impressed with the power of the language and his ability to create vivid scenes and a sense of impending doom. And, of course, there was the sex - in one story a gorgeous hunk of a gay man is held captive as a sex slave and in another we read the memorable lines: "That night I fucked Candy Jones for something like three hours. My nuts ached the whole next day and I couldn't get her out of my mind."

More recently I’ve been reading Gary Indiana’s book reviews to serve as models for my own reviewing. His observations are shrewd and sharp, expressed in such colorful turn of phrase I can almost see his words sizzle on the page. For example, reviewing Red Lights by Georges Simenon: “He also practices a radical economy of language using almost no adjectives or adverbs – his white space is more expressive than much of Hemingway and all of Raymond Carver. I suspect it’s because he didn’t fetishize the search for the perfect, starling word, a cause of literary acne that runs rampant in the work of writers like Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx. He thought the approximate word was quite good enough. Looking for the perfect one would have slowed him down.”

Also Garry Indiana essays which can be biting and caustic in the extreme. This from a piece on Johnny Carson and The Tonight Show: “He has always been there in his network time slot, embalmed in a dense magma of reassuring mediocrity, mugging behind his desk as if to guarantee the faceless millions that they, too, can repeat the same absurd gestures day after day, year after year, without an unbearable amount of suffering.”

I include these quotes as prelude to provide a sense of the radical, anti-mainstream nature of Gary Indiana’s writing, especially when it comes to his critique of art and culture. Although he has well over a dozen books of fiction and non-fiction to his credit, you will be hard pressed to find any references or webpage featuring his work. This guy is as far removed from Facebook and The New York Times as humanly possible. There were those few years back in the 1980s when he was an art critic for The Village Voice in order to eat and pay the rent but his real desire was to write novels.

Gone Tomorrow is Gary Indiana’s second novel recently republished by Seven Stories Press and based on Gary’s experience as an actor in German director Dieter Schidor’s 1985 film Cold in Columbia. The novel’s unnamed first-person narrator shares much with the author – he’s gay, he’s thirty-four, he’s both an actor and a writer.

There’s some action on and off the film set in Cartagena; actually, the paramount action turns out to be all the film people overindulging in booze and a mountain of the Columbian national product along with an entire list of other recreational substances. But the real juice of the novel is the Gary Indiana-like narrator’s searing critical eye taking in all the people and places in and around the film set. On Alex Garvo: “What disturbed me even more was something willfully unreal about him. Something incredible about his “casual” outfit of jeans and pinstripe shirt. Something forced and unbelievable in the stony expressions rolling across his face as he listened to the table talk, his square jaw falling open and clamping shut like a steam shovel, while his pale gray eyes bored holes in the sodden tablecloth.”

In addition to Alex, there’s an entire lineup of ravishing, narcissistic movie queens (both male and female) – Maria, Irma, Carlotta, Valentina, Ray, Michael and the narrator’s best friend, the director of the film, Paul. What an eccentric mix of egos. However, I think it is fair to say not one of these glittering superstars suffers from psychological problems or maladies that couldn’t be addressed by twenty years of intensive psychotherapy.

The narrator’s observations and reflections also extend out to the people of Columbia and their mixing and clashing with wealthy Americans and Europeans. There is even a time when the actors take to the streets shoulder to shoulder with the natives to celebrate Cartagena carnival and the parade of contestants in the Miss Columbia beauty pageant. “”This is insane!” we all kept shouting to each other over the roar of the crowd, laughing, smiling at complete strangers, cruising people in bizarre outfits, catching the startled and delighted looks of people surrendering themselves to a manic fantasy.”

Cartagena is the longer portion of Gone Tomorrow. The last third of the novel is Part Two, seven years later back in New York and Munich, when Ray and Paul join the legions of others who have contracted AIDS. We watch the torturous stages of the disease turn life into unending excruciating pain leading to death.

I can see very clearly why this Gary Indiana novel was published as part of High Risk Books. It’s a novel on the edge but a novel well worth the read. I feel as if I have lived through those stormy cocaine-fueled 1980s all over again via the mind and heart of this nonconformist critic.





Photo of the Artist as a Young Man - American author Gary Indiana, born 1950

[RatGrrrl]

CN. A Lot. Recommend looking up if you have triggers, AIDS

"In spite of the melancholy nature of their journey, and for that matter the wintry bleakness of...whole existence at the time, the plain fact is that even in total hopelessness we go on hoping for things..told me, spinning out narratives, casting ourselves in imaginary movies."

This was something else!

I will be chewing on this one for a long time and don't know if I would ever be able to truly do this book justice with a review.

A shaggy dog story of stories about the death of a friend spools out into an engrossing tale of some genuine and gross people as they make a movie in South America that is at once heightened reality characters that are fascinatingly unlikeable, a surrealist meditation on homosexuality, love, lust, and death, and a harrowing blade hidden in a velvet glove that tears open your throat to rip out your heart with its uncompromising and, respectfully, nightmarish look at the effects of AIDS.

This feels like gonzo literature with every effect building up to and hammering the heart of this story.

It shares that heightened and fantastical reality that speaks to a greater truth through fiction that makes Sarah by JT LeRoy (regardless of everything with Laura Albert).

I'm not going to name them, but works like this that are so powerful and honest, regardless of the fictional elements, highlight how milquetoast and corporate-friendly some Queer art has become.

[t · Rating 4 out of 5]

drunk book review because why not? this book warrants it. so this is the kind of novel that makes me nostalgic for writing 3k essays for that one AIDS in the 80s/90s module (literally hardly last year nostalgia works weirdly huh) because oh my god ? this book deserves all the stupid hyper critical essays because WHAT ? HIV+ anal sex in the concentration camp? a murderous overbearing motherly presence ? so much weird narrative tense stuff going on to the extent that ‘she said that he said i thought’ is commonplace which is so real because at its baseline this novel captures a bitchy gossiping that actually constitutes a lot of knowledge sharing and oral culture. but also i hate the exoticising and colonial and nazistic racial politics so casually underlying basically all of this. defiantly an interesting read, not sure what else i could say.

[Angus McKeogh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strange novel about a cast of characters in Columbia filming a movie during the AIDS epidemic in the 80s. Only the second time since Burroughs where I’ve run across the phrase, “anal mucus.”

[Chad · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best thing I've read all year. Edgy, punk, operatic, perverse (and perversely funny), and teetering on camp, Gary Indiana's Gone Tomorrow is full of stunning writing and brings forth the kind of AIDS-era novel that is unsentimental and doesn't insult the reader's intelligence--something that is sorely missing from today's writing (this was published in 1993). Not for the prudish reader, this book will leave you wondering 'what the fuck did I just read?' in the best way.

This novel is such a mix of genres its difficult to summarize. There's a blurb on the back that aptly conjures up the feel of Gone Tomorrow, saying, "Horribly refreshing, like an ice-cold glass of acid on a sweltering summer day...Indiana writes with an art critic's eye for detail and a poet's ear for language."

Needless to say, I will definitely be reading more of Gary Indiana's work and major kudos to Seven Stories Press for reissuing this landmark queer novel for new readers. 5/5

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

For the past four years, I've been reading one Gary Indiana novel a year. I'd say this is because I'm trying to make his very small bibliography stretch, because I've pretty consistently loved or at least, really really liked, everything I've read from him, but until this year, when I decided to make it an actual thing, it's just been pure coincidence.

I've been putting this one off the longest but despite the only person I trust implicitly blurbing it, I just couldn't really bring myself to pick it up, mostly because I don't like movie books and a lot of books set in Latin America and written by white authors uh, freak me out, but as always I underestimated Gary Indiana and this was great. I liked the mostly unpleasant characters, I liked Gary Indiana as the narrator, I thought the writing was great, I liked the commentary on love and sex and death. It's an AIDS novel, I think there's no getting away from that, but I like how his AIDS novels have something else going on- in the case of Horse Crazy, the obsessive love affair, in the case of Rent Boy, the organ harvesting, in the case of Gone Tomorrow, the movie and also the generational guilt felt by Germans post WWII (yes).

I will also admit that half the fun of reading his novels is picking out not only who he's affectionately referencing, but also who he's shading. Like when he drops a two line reference that could only be referring to Paul Monette.

The ending was a lot, almost too much. I think back to my younger self, being incensed that John Green made his two teenage love interests have their first kiss in the Anne Frank House because the absolute disrespect.

You didn't have to, Gary, but you did and yet I am still going to give this book four solid stars despite you capping the book with a sex scene in a concentration camp crematorium.

Am I leaving that unspoiled. I mean, no one else is talking about that.

I was disappointed at first because I thought I was out of Gary Indiana and that meant the yearly reading challenge was dead, but I just remembered Resentment exists. Yay!

[Jim Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

There was a time in the late 80's-early 90's where "transgressive" literature was all the rage. Works like Ellis' American Psycho, Hell's Go Now, and Acker's Blood and Guts in High School tried to outdo themselves with depictions of depravity and degeneration. Gone Tomorrow fits right in with those books. At times it seems to be trying to shock for shock's sake (anal sex in Dachau anyone?), but overall it is a brutal response to a brutal disease (AIDS) that wiped out a generation of gay artists. The writing is masterful and poetic, even if some of the people and events make you squirm. I'm a big fan of Indiana and this is one of the best books I've read by him. It will not make you feel good at the end.

[Jon-Carlo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gary indiana is craaaaaaazy!

[Crystal]

DNF @ 40%

[Dylan Kiewel · Rating 4 out of 5]

i don't know how it came to occur that gary got involved with two german film productions, and possibly had contact with fassbinder, but i need to know more. this seems to be a book extrapolated from his experience on the set of one of these, cold in columbia (directed by dieter schidor, who provides the basis for the paul character here), which i'm dyin to track down now. the on set part of this also reads like an account of the set of fass' beware of a holy whore, there's references too to veronika voss, querelle, and most aptly wizard of babylon (the controversial bit of documentary schidor shot of fass, interviewing him, very shortly before fass' death). so this book is interesting on one hand for providing gary's perspective into a small pocket of the queer german film scene, the goings on of which very naturally would interest him, but, and this is more where the book becomes his own, on another hand provides his reflections on the inherent rot going on around him, and a more broad emerging anxiety linked to a number of issues ; his getting into middle age, the aids epidemic, the fruit of the 70s undergrounds dying out in the harsh light of the 80s, reagan and the cruel handling of the epidemic delicately hinted at here and there, a small subplot about a roving serial killer perhaps mirroring that. all and all hit a lot of boxes for me. need to read more early gary now.

[haroon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Punk rejection set on the onslaught of AIDS. Imagery of anal on the dirt of a concentration camp… nubby man with a donkey-like appendage… long roads, sunlit, then rain struck… friendly orgy in a Colombian villa… coke, morphine, poppers… for fun… not to mention acid sex in Germany with an actor turned “rent boy” who everyone, years earlier, was in infatuated by… great body apparently… friendly acquaintances dying before dying; slow deaths then dead, but the mourning already happened, so the move on is subdued… beautiful smelly thick imagery— palpable like how Twigs describes “Eusexua”… a bomb with a timer, then come down.

A quick read set on the basis of contrast. South American beauty paragraphs while tourists’ limbs separate from their bones on the adjacent page… a serial killer whose never explained in full detail. An image of a time that is unable to be replicated now. A grainy, but colored film photograph. I believe this went out of print so thank you 21st century — people are still dying, but the internet is a great place for discovering things that were lost.

Indiana’s the prime example of observation laced with opinion.

[Nicolas Chinardet · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not too sure what to think about this.

The structure is unbalanced and the main section of the book (on a south American film set) feel unneeded and unhelpful once we get to the second, final and more significant section which it does little to elucidate. None of the characters are particularly likeable or even that we'll developed, either.

In terms of style and language, some of it is poetic and highly wrought - almost showy - unfortunately the author didn't seem able to sustain this throughout, leading to some actually rather bad writing at times. The reader is presented with many details and minute events that appear significant. To the book (p105), all too often "The moment seems pregnant, but pregnant with nothing".

Yet, all that being said, reading wasn't a chore and eventually delivers a fairly original take on the AIDS novel.

[Brett Warnke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gary Indiana enjoyed the extremes: Sade, Ballard, Bernhard, Manchette, Malaparte. These are his people. His essays are hilarious, a voice you want to go on until it r can't stop. And his fiction, as you'll see here, grapples with America's void, it's hedonic culture in an age of HIV.

Set in 1984 in Cartegena in the book's first half, the wolf at the door is a serial killer and unsated desire on site during a bad movie shoot. The book's second half, part Sade and part Bernhard, winds the reader through NYC's grim '80s.

The first person narrator gives the story an immediacy--one the sex scenes in this book require. Some of the book's characters, like Michael, literally drip with sex. They ARE sex. But the second half sobers up from the coke-fueled orgies. The hangover was worth the delight of the drunk!

[Finn Carroll · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'll read anything Gary Indiana and always enjoy it. But for some reason, the longer ones always suffer bloating in the middle (Do Everything in the Dark) and it fascinates me. Rent Boy had basically nothing to trim off, I could've read on for much longer, but he kept it conscise with enough open endedness to keep us wanting more.

Gone Tomorrow could've ended several times but chose to solider on. I really enjoyed the ending, but there was so much in between the narrator leaving the movie set and the final act. The further characterization of the narrator and some of the minor cast felt completely unnecessary. The dynamic between the Germans and their fag hag was compelling and was a perfect ending. Holocaust hallucinegenic fuck is just such a Gary Indiana sequence to play out, god bless him.

[Sean Dalton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Orgies, serial killers, incest, emotional and psychological manipulation, bodily fluids, slow deliberate murder, voyeurism. You name it, Gone Tomorrow has it.

Wonderful but profoundly weird. Possibly the weirdest novel I’ve ever read. It starts with a really interesting first act: the nameless narrator describes his experience filming a weird art house movie in Colombia with the most bizarre cast of characters involved in the film, and a serial killer prowling the area. Then the second act describes the insane endings for those involved, in very graphic detail. So many unbelievable things are narrated that you genuinely read the book with a confused and concerned look on your face.

It was genuinely so strange but it worked perfectly. Indiana is my favorite author of first person narration and this was no different. I also love how it made poignant observations about life, about queerness, and mostly about the AIDS crisis using the most extravagant and nasty tale I’ve read in a while. Was it disgusting? Yes, but in an artful way. I really enjoyed my time with this book.

My only critique is I would have liked more serial killer content, but that’s just my personal insanity.

[Micaela · Rating 2 out of 5]

Apathy, unfortunately. Usually I can’t stand 90% of a Gary Indiana novel, but his masterfully crafted sentences and ridiculous vocabulary keep me hooked. Not this time. I’ve already read I Can Give You Anything But Love, which contained this story in a more engaging and less bloated way. I was promised that the second part was weepy and affective and moving and whatnot. I didn’t feel that way about it, but the last paragraph was nice.

[Olivia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gary Indiana’s books are such sleeper hits to me like I can’t even explain what it is about his writing that gets me because it’s so understated and perfect. This book made me nauseous at several points and it is not beautiful at all. But it is tender, and it’s so honest, and so quippy and mean and dumb. I loved it. An important book when it was first published too I can imagine

[Marianna Baylo · Rating 2 out of 5]

não gostei muito da narrativa :// tbm fiquei incomodada com os comentários xenofobicos de alguns personagens, não senti que teve alguma crítica a isso sabe parecia que tava dentro da "mensagem" do livro

[James Casieri · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's a quote on the back of my Invisible Cities paperback that goes like, "If I were trapped on a desert island with only one book, I'd choose this one," because of the depth and variety and timeless beauty.

I'd choose Gone Tomorrow.

[Iza Cupial · Rating 4 out of 5]

4,5

[Finn McMurray]

good

[Aurora · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF at about 40% 2/11/24

[Josie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exotic and transgressive, always on the verge of a tubercular spit of blood or a caustic bitchfest between two longtime rivals. It saunters on a bit long, but it makes up for it with its lurid encounters of the flesh and morbidly hilarious humor.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really fine novel, funny, moving, sexy, erotic and one that stays with you long after it is finished. I admire and like Gary Indiana's writing. As a UK resident I came to know him for his fiction - most of his 'cultural commentary' work is unknown to me (though I have lots of it pegged to read) - and perhaps I am lucky that I don't because I can approach works like this without the 'baggage' of preconceptions and prejudices one has towards writers who write regularly in magazines about the world you are living in.

I am also grateful that is still possible to buy copies of this novel for a reasonable price - which can't be said about many of his story collections like Scar Tissue or White Trash Boulevard - in the UK none of his fiction, or most his non fiction, is available in libraries.

I think his writing is bold and, nearly thirty years, holds its own as worth reading. In the end that is all you can ask of first rate fiction - that though you know nothing of the author or his world (beyond whatever self serving publicity twaddle the publishers scrawl on the reverse of a book) you are engaged by his work and find that it speaks to you.

[Aaron McQuiston · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gary Indiana's novel "Gone Tomorrow" took me some time to read. I was not really enthralled by the first half, but I kept reading because some of the writing is magnificent. Through the droll first 160+ pages, there would be a sentence or paragraph or image that stuck out and proved to me that he is a fascinating writer, but the story, about making a movie in Columbia, really was not too interesting.
The second part however really makes a emotional case regarding watching friends slowly dying. There are heart wrenching descriptions of how it feels to watch someone die.

I am curious about how he chose to write this novel in a hearsay format. The narrator gathers facts through talking to friends over drinks, and some of those friends are repeating what other friends said. It makes the idea of the narrative very unreliable, but in that unreliability, the story becomes more and more emotionally charge. Throughout the hedonistic first part, I found that I really did not care at all for the characters because they were more caricatures of people, people putting on a front to be cool or whatever they assume their friends would think is cool. In the second part, the caricatures are ripped away, the fronts get killed by disease, and beneath all of the posturing, the characters are real, with real fears and emotions.

And maybe this is one of the points Gary Indiana is trying to make. Regardless of how cool you think you are, in the end, we are all the same...afraid of dying...afraid of watching people die.

[John Treat · Rating 1 out of 5]

I shouldn't have read this so soon as Keith McDermott's ACQUA CALDA: more spoiled, drug-and-alcohol-addled creative types out for a self-destructive romp in a tropic clime, this time South America. Dull, tedious, and unsympathetic. Everyone, please do the reader a favor and self-destruct at home in Berlin and New York.

It is true, as other reviewers have noted, that the book improves marked as it nears its predictable conclusion, if operatically. The final paragraph is worth the wait. But by that time, you won't care about any of the characters. It's too bad, really.

[Gaby Cepeda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Indiana's writing in this novel is enthralling. His use of verbs is outlandish, and his descriptive tirades of cockroaches, dinner party anxieties and the body horror of illness are truly entrancing. The second and last part of the novel works more as an epilogue, with the main narrating characters grasping to come to terms with the changing world they now inhabit. A descriptive baroqueness takes over the text in an intense (for more than one reason) sexual escapade and the dreadful emotional landscape of a seemingly unavoidable plague.

[Notcathy J · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Writes pathetically badly. A poisonous addiction to ellipses. (p.34) But see part II for a much more emotionally profound narrative. Still addicted to mixing metaphors in the most horrible way. Great plot, but too sprawling."