Gary Indiana in front of his Los Angeles apartment building, 2021. Copyright Laura Owens.

We at the Review are mourning the loss of Gary Indiana. We are grateful for his work, and to have published an Art of Fiction interview with Tobi Haslett in issue no. 238. At a recent launch party, he gave a reading of several James Schuyler poems he loved, including this one. We hope to be adding remembrances in the coming days.

One thing I should put out there before giving my first last thoughts about Gary Indiana is that it doesn’t matter what I think. I learned this from him. My estimation of Gary comes so late in the game as to be worthless: he’d downed the same drinks and smoked the same cigarettes and had the same conversations about the same famous names with so many younger writers before me that it was a testament to the vastness of his appetite and perhaps also to the vastness of his loneliness that he still insisted through his eighth decade of life on doing what he did, which was—between making books and essays—hanging out deep into the night and pretending we had a culture. I’d often wake up the mornings after to find an email continuing our discussion—a multiparagraph missive sent from [email protected]—and I always meant to ask him if he’d ever been in touch with the person who’d created the original email address named after Irma Vep, that femme fatale and anagrammatical “vampire” played by Musidora. He loved Les vampires, and crime films and fiction of all kinds. This was our major subject—noirs, antinoirs, procedurals, detection—and now it’s his dead body locked alone in the top-floor room. Gary Indiana, the alias, the self-invention, was smart, mean, honest, and usually correct; the man behind the mask, I never met; again, I was too young and also, maybe, too straight, so instead of his bared heart, I got the writerly complaint. I think with all the art people and music people and fashion people and so on in his life, he just liked to sit down with another person who was baffled by the language. His true crime or true-enough crime trilogy is a masterpiece and deserves the Library of America today, agents and editors and rights issues be damned; publishers were always fucking Gary over. But despite a battered career, he knew who he was. One night at the Scratcher, we were joined by Ben Wizner, the ACLU lawyer representing a fresh-faced whistleblower named Edward Snowden. An inveterate hater of the U.S. intelligence community for, among other things, its invention of AIDS (Gary had a lot of theories), our own homegrown Elf King stood up at the table and declared, “I want you to tell Edward Snowden that the greatest living American novelist would like to suck his dick.” The message was delivered. A pity the mission was never accomplished.

—Joshua Cohen

I was supposed to take him to a party tonight. He was doing all right until last week. He’d been in and out of cancer treatment for a couple of years, but things seemed to be going well, however many jokes he would make about being on “the off-ramp of life.” He was planning to go to France to make a movie. I told him I would come with him whether he gave me a part or not. A couple of weeks ago he dug up an essay he’d written about Curzio Malaparte but never published, so I sold it to an editor I know, with a new magazine that’s paying pretty decent rates. The editor was happy to have it. Gary called me last Wednesday morning and said, “Christian, they sent me all this fucking paperwork, and I just can’t do it. I feel like shit. You have to do it for me.” It was my birthday. Our last conversation: a present. The last few days were all phone tag. I told him I would do it. I asked him to forward me the emails. He wrote back: “I certainly can’t do that.” I got the contracts from the editor, and he said, “We have one edit.” They wanted to change the phrase “transigent literary incubus” in the first sentence of the essay to “capricious literary incubus,” because they thought readers would have to look up transigent. I looked up both words and told them that Gary was using transigent in a very precise manner, to indicate the way Malaparte would accommodate whoever was in power at the time wherever he was at the time, Mussolini or Stalin or Mao. Gary liked to make us look up words. He was always right. He drew on all the resources of the English language with great exactitude, humaneness, and sympathy. So I said stet. They stetted it. They sent me the contracts and tax forms. I was planning to bring them over today to get his social security number and then take him to the party. Oh well. We’re going to miss him, to put it mildly.

—Christian Lorentzen

Joshua Cohen was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family.

Christian Lorentzen is a writer and editor. He has a news­letter on Substack.