Do Everything in the Dark

by Gary Indiana, Olivia Laing (Introduction)

A dark yet compassionate comedy of art aspirations and friendships come to naught.

First published in 2003, Gary Indiana’s turn-of-the-millennium novel traces the lives of a loosely connected group of New York artists and the dissolution of their scene. 

During the summer of 2001, the narrator of Do Everything in the Dark, a gallery curator, receives intermittent dispatches from his far-flung friends—many of whom resemble well-known figures in the art and intellectual worlds—who are spread out across the globe, from Istanbul to Provincetown to Santa Fe. Seeking various reprieves from a changed New York, the long-festering, glossed-over incompatibilities of these aging bohemians blossom into exotic and unbearable relief. Beneath the contemporary excesses Indiana chronicles, we can see the outlines of the earlier New York bohemia captured by Dawn Powell.

Arguably Indiana’s most intimate, internal, and compassionate work to date, Do Everything in the Dark is a chilling chronicle of madness and failure, success and disappointment, and the many ways love dies in a world people find increasingly unlivable.

Genres: Fiction, LGBT, Novels, Queer, 21st Century, Art, Literature

298 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2003

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

[Lee Klein · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intermittently enjoyable character descriptions, bitchy bon-mot putdowns (reminded me of Michael Musto's columns in the Village Voice long ago). Too long by half -- Renata Adler knows not to exceed 200 pages of fractured description/thematic suggestion. Aging narcissistic neurotic mostly homosexual artists/actors without conventional jobs or significant responsibilities (eg, no kids or pets or even houseplants). Off-putting unenlightened hierarchical concerns. Liked that a lot of it describes 2000-era NYC when I lived there, descriptions of the Virgin Megastore for example or pre-9/11 TriBeCa, but often insightful and mean-spirited amusement (zero LOLs) seemed cloying by page 160 and I skimmed the rest. Got it thanks to laudatory tweet from the critic I most respect (I suppose because his opinions come closest to mine). Expectations lead to disappointment, although I could see how an aging NYC-based bachelor critic might enjoy this more than I do at this point in my life. Would like to know who each character is based on but no roman-a-clef key comes up online. Felt at times like source material for A Little Life.

[Jeff Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wickedly funny, wonderfully barbed prose. A series of portraits that gradually coalesces into a novel. Interlocking tales of once vibrant artists from New York City's 1980s demimonde who've fallen on hard times. An empathetic navigation of life's crises that still feels timely.
4.5 stars

[Alex Greenberger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wait, so how was this out of print before this year?

A lot of reviews have said this book is about being gay in New York, and thankfully, it isn't, really. I mean, it is. Everything Gary Indiana writes sort of is, because everything Gary Indiana writes is sort of autobiographical, and Gary Indiana is gay and sort of in New York. (Sometimes, he's in Cuba or elsewhere abroad.) But it's also a book about discovering that, whereas it once cool to be different when you were young, it's hard not to fit in as you get older. Times change, and so do the people around you. While everyone's getting married, having stable jobs, and preparing to have kids, there's this book's cast of misfits. It ain't easy being green anywhere, but especially in New York.

[ra · Rating 5 out of 5]

i loved this book because i love miserable people and hate going to art show openings. real sense of death and extinction in this one! upon first impression i kept thinking about the hoards of the dead in t.s eliot's the wasteland like the i had not thought that death had undone so many. you know. and there's probably a vaguely interesting comparison to be made here to my year of rest and relaxation (given their similarity in time frame, and 'scene') particularly with regards to the fact that this book is such an iridescent cross-section of life at a specific time whereas myor&r is so isolated but mostly it's about cauterization because how do you even live like this. anyway i think my favourite section was this one incredibly long letter between two characters; i love when it'd go from these vignette descriptions to suddenly just being like holy fuck what is this. is this life? surely not. please say it's not. BUT IT IS! should we all kill ourselves

— "And all the summer's internecine dramas, despite my role in most of them as a passive sounding board, have exhausted me in a way that I can't recuperate with vitamins or sleep."

[michal k-c · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not really the biggest Sontag fan but wow GI is an all time hater. His hating performs a signification function in the denouement, i'm talking about STRUCTURAL hating. not many people are on that level

[Cleo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mean & bitchy

[Macartney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Set in the summer of 2001, it’s 100% Gary Indiana’s 9/11 novel — which I didn’t know before starting lol. So, yeah! That said, it was catty, sardonic, and sublime — and I mostly loved it. Most of it also went over my head lol. One thing that didn’t go over my head: the blistering chapter on David Wojnarowicz and Peter Hujar (er, “Adam” and “Bruce”) — wowza! When I thought the book had come out in the 90s, the page anthropomorphizing the wind creaks and noises of the the World Trade Center buildings was heartbreaking. When I realized it had come out in 2003, it was cheesy and heartbreaking.

[Misch]

Felt right to finish this on a rainy weekend. Felt right to read this after two other depressing tales that hover around the tri-state area. What is the cure for cosmic blues and global bummers? What did we lose exactly and when was it lost? Praying.

[Dylan Kiewel · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 gary books in and jesus h christ does the guy love the words "inchoate" and "desuetude". still tho, this guy just shits out masterpieces like they going out of style (which they are) read just bout as quick as i could on a cold couple flights over these here cold and hardly united states

[Alexandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

"It weights him with the knowledge that he could go anywhere and never be surprised again by anything. The world has become too twined, too insalubrious with suffering, to float through it, as if one has the right to be anywhere."

[M Nottke · Rating 2 out of 5]

Want to give it a 2.5. I chose this as my subway commute read and I don't think this book was meant for that. While I usually enjoy books that are a bit meander-y, the constantly alternating story lines where the plot was more internal than external made it difficult to remember exactly who everyone was and what their journeys were. If I read this in a shorter time frame and not on public transit, I imagine this would have been less of a problem for me.

[Jeff]

Great pick for book club @will. “We should all burn our dummies when they dont support our delusions any more.” Yeah!

[Erik · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gary Indiana has a belied knack for building his characters in a way that makes you really wonder if he knows where his books will end when he starts writing. Admittedly, this left me a bit frustrated as I began the book because for much of the first third of the book readers are left in the dark about the characters they are encountering.

But I did not give up and by the middle of the book I had some how gotten hooked onto the stories of these characters. And what arises out of this confusing introduction is a deeply thoughtful and theoretical conversation about the ways in which we as contemporary subjects deal with the ever encompassing problem of boredom. As boredom comes to rule out lives what do things like death and mental illness and love and sex mean? Are they merely just tools we use to avoid confronting how bored we really are? Or is there something meaningful in them? For Indiana, I think the answer is both and neither. But in the end, readers walk away from his writing confronted with the reality that their own boredoms can't be covered up or hidden away.

While the writing itself is tedious at times, and as I mentioned, Indiana isn't the best at building up his characters, the overall theoretical ideas he is considering make this book a notable read.

[Andy Burroughs · Rating 5 out of 5]

would give my leg for the barb Krueger edition.

[Adam Messinger · Rating 3 out of 5]

Part one of this book is masterful. The way he renders his friends and paints them in these brief snapshots of their lives at a crossroads was incredible (and will absolutely leak into future writing projects of mine). His sentences were jam packed with illuminating, gossipy visions of the people who inhabit his world and I was so ready to go on this ride.

Then part two started and everything changed. The chapters got longer, more bloated. The introduction of characters who acted like ghosts on the margins of this story began to get repetitive and with less pay offs. At almost 300 pages, I really wished he had trimmed at least 60 of them. I hate to be the type of person who says a book was too long or boring but by the end I felt like I had lost sight of who these characters were and by the time we left them I didn’t care about where they were going and who they had been.

There is a really incredible, era defining book buried in here, but unfortunately it gets lost in the rambling second and third acts and I wished a gay little editor had stepped in and said hey Gare Bear trim this back a bit babe.

Worth it for the first 150 pages though. Will revisit that section in the future fo sho.

[death spiral · Rating 3 out of 5]

For all the nasty one-liners and hard-boiled similes in here, the meanest thing GI does is name his Sontag stand-in “Tova Finkelstein”

[Leo · Rating 3 out of 5]

not much meat on this particular bone

[Anna Lancry · Rating 5 out of 5]

"You have your face written all over your face."

[Disco Reimann · Rating 5 out of 5]

I haven’t read Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov, but from what I’ve gathered from the depths of Reddit, the protagonist was a weak-willed neurotic apathetic, lazy and parasitic. DEITD is a love letter from Gary Indiana to his friends who were also Oblomov-ic. They were artists and queers of the NYC 80s who have been boiled then left to simmer in the crevices of their summers homes. They were promised everything but instead found an after-taste to freedom that lingers from one tragedy to the next. This book is also a love letter to himself. He notes in the forward that with years of distance, he realizes he sprinkled himself into each vignette, finding it easier to project his self-hating flaws away from himself onto the others. A brilliant form for a memoir imo.

I loved it, and also the book is so specific sometimes that it’s almost entirely inaccessible to me. It’s about Nan Goldin, Susan Sontag, David Wojnarowicz, people I vaguely know but not enough to understand the inside jokes and reads happening all around the plot. It makes me feel a closeness to these people I never knew, though. At least a closeness to how much I’m sure I also would have wanted to satirize them (and also consume every one of their creative endeavors). This book made me horny too, which was a spicy plus.

“Let’s assume, at least, that the big picture isn’t a rectangle, a film of watered silk in a frame, or a mastermind’s jump cut, but something more like an urn on a mantelpiece.”

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great novel about being old, gay, and lost in NYC.

[Brian Grover · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished this shortly after I finished Wolf Hall - two books that had been on my "to read" list for a long time, and I kept putting them off. I thought this might be too dark or too weird for me, but it was much warmer and more accessible than I'd expected.

I was won over immediately by the epigraph, which explains the book's title: "Do all in the dark (as clean glasses, etc.) to save your master's candles." - Jonathan Swift, Directions to Servants. I think maybe I need to read some Jonathan Swift.

Anyway, from what I can tell, this is a sort of roman a clef set in the summer of 2001, where Indiana is spending a somewhat boring/depressed summer in New York City, but talking/writing with friends scattered around the country and the globe, and he shuffles back and forth between their stories here.

It would be useful if there had been a Cast of Characters at the start of this book, because it did take me a while to figure out who was who - that's partly because I was an indifferent reader to begin, as noted above. I was probably a third of the way through or more before I realized I was enjoying myself, and started looking forward to the nightly reads. Indiana is (or comes across here as) a nice guy, but he's a massive cynic, which is how I'd say I identify. His writing is really sharp - I'm not a book highlighter, but there are a LOT of sentences/paragraphs that I thought upon reading them here "yes, that's exactly how I feel".

This is maybe his best book, but I'm gonna read another (and some Swift). Four stars.

[Micaela]

So, I knew that Gary Indiana would not be the one to end my months long reading slump going into this book. I’ve read a handful of his books, and found the best of that lot to be just alright. The bitchy imp had an incredible vocabulary and could string together a beautiful sentence when he felt like it. Gary Indiana seemingly wrote novels for the sole purpose of talking shit about whichever of his closest friends and/or acquaintances he’d had a falling out with, which was essentially everybody several times over. Meaning that each novel tends to be a circus of the same stories—the same people he hates (mostly his friend Susan), the same people he wants to fuck who don’t want to fuck him (various models and actors, occasionally David Wojnarowicz), the same scenes he hates (mostly the literary and art worlds, but especially NYC ((I get it, I also live here more or less against my will))), and the occasional Dennis Cooper emulation (DC essentially couldn’t stand him stand him). Anyway, my boyfriend who has insisted that I read this book, and ever other Indiana book, is rushing because he thinks it’s going to rain again (it’s not) and he wants to go to the grocery store together, but basically he loves to be contrarian and insists that one of these days, I will read an Indiana book that shocks me more than a Dennis Cooper book, which ain’t gonna happen. Bless his little heart! Gary Indiana’s, too. Alright.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Appropriately difficult and beautifully written, Do Everything in the Dark seems to ask the question, 'are we inside the reality of the world we are living in or outside of it, and how do the relationships experienced position where one stands in this?' The omniscient narrator, while never making this kind of declaration explicitly, nonetheless has an ambivalence with the world and the precipice it teeters on, and elaborates this relationship with a comparison to those relationships he has with others whether near and close or far and remote. I loved most discovering the hidden personalities of David Wojnarowicz and Peter Hujar, and then of course considered how any of the people populating this work are compiled 'blind items' for the reader to consider. And, well, with any legendary history such as the one Mr. Indiana has inhabited and been in the midst of, this is understandable. Gary Indiana is an artist, he is a treasure of a specific time and place rapidly rushing toward the falls.

[Jessica Buie · Rating 3 out of 5]

New York City as a living cemetery where all of yesterday’s jouissance has faded into depressing memories of youth and potential. This book shows one of many possible nightmare futures for certain kinds of creatives coming out of the wildly productive art/literature world of the 80s and into the drab corporate megalopolis 90s, but its relevance still applies when read today. Kind of painfully so.

[Tom Collingridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Superdry wit, great little scenes, amusing often tragic characters.... All good. Only (fairly big) reservation is that it took about half the book of plotless jumping about between countless characters you can't keep track of (partly because there's little to no narrative to follow) before the thing coalesced into something approaching a plot, with a focus on 7 or 8 people. A good editor could have helped make this a little masterpiece. But still, a great read.

[Sofia Sitterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

i will admit i came close to DNFing thjs book (not something i do often) and am beyond glad that i pushed through. parts 2 and 3 pulled me in like a forceful, not entirely welcome hug that turned into a warm embrace. gary and his friends are obnoxious and messy but undeniably lovable. he spills their darkest secrets and revels in their failures, but with an abundance of love and compassion.

i loved this book and will be thinking about it for a while!!

[Shadib Bin · Rating 1 out of 5]

2/3 finished - couldn’t really finish.

There are some excellent writings but the structure of the book and observations are so robotic and monotonous for most of it - it’s been absolutely dreadful to go through this book.

I still feel like he would be a great author / artist to explore - but as where I am right now, this book isn’t my cup of tea.

Rest in Peace, Gary.

[Jesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three and a half? Liked but didn’t love this, which had some flashes of great writing and others of sometimes tedious roman-a-clef score-settling. I felt difficulty grasping a lot of the characters emotionally: they never quite became real people for me, and I enjoyed reading it less because of that.

[Zach Werbalowsky · Rating 5 out of 5]

My kinda book. Somehow Gary Indiana just keeps getting better as I read more and more (this being the sixth book, the ones I have read in no particular order). This one was brutal and hilarious. A certain kind of life that slowly unravels in America is in focus here.

[Nico · Rating 3 out of 5]

This, right here:

"Gary Indiana’s newest autopsy of America’s walking dead examines the tragicomic fate of la vie boheme when its cherished delusions and brightest hopes succumb to the harsh realities of the aging process."