Gone Tomorrow (High Risk Books)

Rating:
Summary: Hearts of darkness attempting to penetrate the glare
Review: "Let me tell you about Columbia..." So begins the nameless, Conradian narrator in part 1 of Gary Indiana's _Gone Tomorrow_. He aims to recount his vivid experiences on a movie set in the early '80s. As the title implies, death prowls close to the characters, described here in a sort of pornography of "international white trash." It's a memoir of "low-burning adventurism," in which there is hardly any present but the episodic shooting of disconnected scenes; the Epicurean shenanigans of the director, producer, and actors (most of whom will be "gone" by novel's end); and the threat of vampires and disease.

It's all past and future: the lush recollections that frame the narrative, on the one hand, and the quivery anticipations of doom, on the other, so graphically recalled in part 2, where the narrating switches to Robert, the one who mostly just listens, on the roof of the Chelsea, in part 1. Years after the drugs, booze, and sex of the Third World, New York and Munich later in the decade become sites of ghastly illness and nutty cures, of botched suicide and domestic arrangements of inconvenience.

Appropriately, Indiana's prose modulates into a pastiche of Thomas Bernhard: "I now realize, I said, how much money it costs to save your own life in America, a malignant tumor of a country where having any serious illness amounts to financial ruin. This pestilent country, I told Robert..." who fills in some of the gaps left by the narrator of a book that reads, finally, like a detective novel (how did Paul, the director, die?) written for the cinema, haunted by the nightmare imagery of bad trips, dissolute sex, and memories of holocaust; and closed with the hardly consoling moralism of the fable. The "horror" of Conrad's doubly-parted heart, it seems, never extended so jet-setting a reach, nor was given so equivalent a treatment, as in Indiana's astonishing novel.

Rating:
Summary: Disgusting, cruel, unfunny book
Review: I guess the author thought his subjects were funny--disabled people, sick people, people dying. If so, he's the only one. I finished the book only to see if it could get even worse, the writing so sloppy, the characters tinny, and the situations entirely cruel in their exaggeration. I couldn't find one single insight into gay life (or any life) that makes this book worth keeping, and I didn't.