Gary Indiana, _I Can Give You Anything But Love_

 READING COOKIE MUELLER inspired me to finally read this, which has been siting on the shelf since 2015--Mueller and Indiana ran in the same circles in New York City for a while.

I Can Give You Anything But Love is a memoir in sixteen chapters. The opening pages of each chapter describe Indiana's situation as he is drafting the book: on an extended visit to Havana, where he devotes a lot of the time when he is not working to Havana's pingueros. Although these passages were not the main draw of the book, they were brisk, vivid, and clear-eyed, not at all steeped in romanticism about the revolution or about Havana's pre-revolutionary bacchanal days. 

Indiana generally keeps romanticization at arm's length, whatever the topic, as you might guess from his title. Chapter 5 provides a good overview of why Indiana never went in for partnering-up, monogamy, fidelity, or any of our culture's most heavily-promoted versions of love. 

He devotes a chapter to his teenage years in New Hampshire and a chapter to his escape to San Francisco (he drops out of Berkeley just in time for the Summer of Love), but he writes mainly of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when he was in Los Angeles and New York City. The book is reminiscent of Henri Murger's Scènes de la Vie de Bohème: motley crews with big plans in theater, music, literature, or radical politics who are scraping by on various ill-paid work while devoting themselves to sex, drugs, and talk. 

Accordingly, the book might remind you of Rent (or La Bohème) save that it ends somewhat before AIDS began its ravages and, as mentioned already, Indiana is allergic to sentimentality. 

It ends, too, before Indiana has become a well known writer, as he subsequently did. This is a common pattern. Goethe, Yeats, André Gide, and Philip Roth all wrote autobiographies that wrap up right at the point where they are about to hit it big and become famous. Paul Auster's Hand to Mouth is the clearest example--it ends just when his writing career hits an absolute nadir.

Indiana is a much better writer than Murger, though--definitely more in the Gide or Auster class. Take this account of driving up to look at the famous Hollywood sign from behind:

   I often found myself driving on an unpaved access road that slithered along ridges hemmed with pines and juniper bushes to a flat, dusty plateau right below the observatory on Mount Lee. There was an outcrop  of jagged travertine with caves woven through it. Sometimes I walked around in the caves, through puddles of bat guano, wary of rattlesnakes. Around a bend in the road, the reverse of the Hollywood sign came into view, the letters, held up on charred diagonal pylons, a bricolage of white-painted metal sheets pocked with bullet holes. The ledge the sign perched on revealed a startling panorama, the city spread out like an endless construction site sprinkled with talcum power.

Damn. That is good writing, and also indicative of Indiana's skepticism about façades, whether of structures or of institutions or of people. Some unnamed-but-recognizable folks get some venomous dismissals--William Vollman ("Nothing he wrote could possibly interest an adult for longer than ten minutes") or Joyce Carol Oates ("a twaddle factory"), and some named ones (Susan Sontag, Kathy Acker, David Lynch) fare only a little better. Hemingway comes in for some cudgeling, and The Great Gatsby "is often mistaken for a great novel because it can be read in a few hours and its characters are rich people who come to a bad end." (I might point out that the novel's richest people, the Buchanans, seem to get off lightly.)

I am so impressed by Indiana's writing that I want to read more, but most of his fiction seems to be of the noir variety, whose charms elude me. (Indiana prefers Simenon to Camus.) Well, we'll see.