| Title | : | Do Everything in the Dark |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0312312067 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780312312060 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 274 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2003 |
The novel follows several couples and solitary wanderers through the summer of 2001, as their internationally scattered vacations throw long-festering, glossed-over incompatibilities and resentments into exotic and unbearable relief. Indiana shows his large and terrifyingly credible cast of America’s cultural elite exhibiting their worst behavior, while sympathizing with their underlying fears and frailties and thwarted good intentions.
Do Everything in the Dark is Indiana’s darkest and funniest novel, but also his deepest exploration of our least manageable, most uncomfortable emotions.
Do Everything in the Dark Reviews
-
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. -
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 -
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. -
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. -
A great novel about being old, gay, and lost in NYC.
-
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.
-
this book invented me as I read it like pygmalion creating galatea
-
Tova kind of reminded me of Lydia Tar.
-
Just got it and plan to get into it over the Labor Day weekend.
