The writer Gary Indiana, who died last week at the age of 74, wrote about his obsessions with the calculated grace of a man who found them slightly embarrassing. He was a stylist of remarkable erudition, and possessed a startling range; his essays, criticism, plays, films, and fiction spanned seemingly endless topics, among them French Disneyland, Cuban prisons, the journalist Renata Adler, the sculptor Richard Serra, true-crime stories, the Boston Marathon bombings, and various men whose beauty slayed him. For the past several decades, he lived in a sixth-floor East Village walk-up cramped with thousands of volumes of literature. In Horse Crazy, Indiana’s first and best novel, his unnamed narrator invites a prospective boyfriend to his similarly cluttered apartment and feels ashamed—not of its mess, exactly, but of the sheer number of books on his shelves. “I suppose this is my life,” he says, after longing “for a garbage dumpster big enough to swallow the entire past.”
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