Customer Reviews

Let It Bleed: Essays 1985 -1995

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I'm constantly telling people to read Gary Indiana. For one thing, no one writes as well as he does. There's a kind of mental courage in all of his work that I cannot describe, but I can say that it has everything to do with translating acute observation into transparent prose. Indiana has applied himself to our civilization's descent into barbarism, which he correctly identifies as our incredible ability to stop thinking, without losing a sense of humor or scale or succumbing to hysteria. When things look grim I like to remind myself that we still have writers as good as Indiana -- one of the last of the tall trees, as Mary McCarthy once said -- well, we still have one writer as good as Indiana. The perfect book to take with you on your trip to Branson, Missouri, Eurodisney, any courtroom in Los Angeles or anywhere, for that matter.

If you think that good criticism is based on an ability to make fun of everything, including people's physical shapes (double-chins, etc.), then this is the book for you. Indiana seems to feel that everything is waiting for his poison pen, and scurrilous laughter. Yet he and his writings are very vulnerable targets for enormous satire themselves. On a larger level, Indiana is symptomatic of a time when there's a confusion between genuine criticism and personal attack. In the former, he's lacking; in the latter, he's a good practitioner--too pretentious to be other than good. He seems to want to imitate Gore Vidal, a real expert at both types of criticism. Vidal, at his best, illuminates, and even champions, while Indiana merely fires and poses, embarrassingly.