Sorry, odiophiliacs! He is very much not a twitterhammer who chases dunks for space bucks. Was there ever a vote on what snark actually is? Whatever it is, that is not what Indiana sells. Many of his most barbed darts are delivered with affection, and considerable attention to detail. Noโthe needle moves slowly over the flesh until it hits a vein. He added that his life as a critic began in part because someone needed him to do the jobโat first, the Village Voice.
His need to write was not tied specifically to any particular mode, beyond paying the rent. It is the sense of being engaged in a wider moral task that feels more European than his disdainโor his taste for arm-sweeping an improbability off the table. These pronouncements are more careful than they first appear. Only a writer spoiling for, well, a comments-section fight would imagine that Indiana had read all the existing comment threads and held him to that pseudoscientific baseline.
He shares the quasi-European stance with another quasi-European, Susan Sontag, an erstwhile friend he has often been compared to. Critic work comes easier than fiction or drama because there is always a proximate need, and the requirements are nonexistent. We begin with a piece on fierce Putin critic Anna Politkovskaya, which also highlights some of the limits to the Indiana approach.
Has something changed for the better in our society? Indiana cares about sentences and he cares about his friends. Along with the King piece, this report makes a strong case for Indiana being hired right now, today, as a feature writer unburdened by a word count ceiling. He told Lorentzen he moved away from criticism initially because he wanted to do more reported work.
Indiana has little common cause with the take-meisters because his stories are quite wide in emotional tone, rooted both in his experience and a political conscience. As heartbreaking as the issues of could be, they were all episodes in another endless conflict: class war. It is the inescapable density of life that propels Indiana, a sense that experience deserves to be written about, but also that writing must not dissolve into the weak gas of opinion. Executions hurt like hell and money changes everything.
