August, 1997
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Disarmed By Grace

A Candid Conversation with Gary Indiana

by Lori Weiner

Gary Indiana is among the five greatest living American novelists, but his relaxed banter and good-natured cynicism could just as easily belong to a favorite, eccentric cousin. An enthusiastic devotee of Faulkner and Doestoevsky, Indiana's latest novel, Resentment: A Comedy (Doubleday) is informed by the former's lush descriptive landscapes and the latter's platitudinal precepts of social justice.

The fortysomething author considers Resentment: A Comedy to be the best of his four novels, and critics agree: Michael Tolkin raves that "the culture of scandal finally has the novel it needs," Patrick McGrath calls Resentment "hilariously toxic satire," and Dennis Cooper opines, "Resentment is a trenchant, savage, supple, awe-inspiring study of emotional and sexual horror."

Resentment was fomented by the 1989-90 trial of Erik and Lyle Menendez. Indiana was captivated not only by the event itself, but the public's obsession with its denouement and expiation. Indiana watched the proceedings daily on Court TV, and when visiting Los Angeles after the trial ended, decided to write a book that would address "exactly what really goes through people's minds when they think of the people close to them ... all the things they never say, all the resentment and anger they suppress because of manners, all the ugly shit locked up in people's brains that causes them one fine day to pick up a shotgun and blow somebody's brains out."

LW: How long have you been writing?

GI: I really can't remember a time when I didn't write ... it must have been something in school, an essay or something. I did want to be a writer when I was very young, but then I went through a whole long period where I didn't think I probably could be a writer, mostly in my teens and early 20s. I always wanted to write novels. ... I mean, I like writing plays and stuff like that, but I always wanted to write novels. I always thought novels were this nice solid thick things ... it turns out to be probably, if novels were read by people anymore, the form of it is to me the most interesting of anything because you can do them so many different ways. It's not so hard to figure out how to do a short story because you know you're going to get to the end of it pretty soon, but when you get in the middle of a novel, you don't think you'll ever finish it. It usually takes me two or three years to write one. I usually take a break from it at some point ... but only after you reach what Kafka called "the point of no return," when you know that you're going to finish it, that you HAVE to finish it.

LW: Have you ever felt frustrated with a novel, like the "point of no return" was not coming?

GI: I've started and written 10 to 100 pages of SO many potential novels that were never finished, that I can't tell you. All the ones that were published, I realized at some point that I knew how to do the rest of it. But I have a lot of false starts and things that I couldn't find the right voice for, the right technique. I try not to do that now between books ... I try to really just wait, because I've discovered now, after four novels, that what happens is that if I finish writing the book, between the time that I finish writing it and the time it's published, I have a million ideas, and I used to just, like, launch into whichever one seemed the most feasible, and try to do it, and invariably I would not be able to continue after a certain point. What I had to learn, 'cause this is just my process, is that the period immediately after a book is published, I don't have any useful ideas and I probably won't until one comes and really hits me in the face. That's how I've gotten the idea for every one of my books.

LW: How did your first book, Horse Crazy, come about?

GI: Horse Crazy is probably the most autobiographical of my books - first novels tend to be drawn very directly from the author's experience. In that case, I had just gone through a very horrendous personal relationship, and I just found that the structure of the relationship that I'd had was so unbelievable and so horrifying that if I could capture the exact structure of it on paper I would really have done something.

If I look at it today I'll probably just see mistakes, or things I should have put in or done differently ... for that book, I actually had an idea of simply, like, the structure of how a particular thing happens between people. If I could duplicate that it didn't matter if the characters resembled the real-life people. The structure of the relationship was what I was after.

LW: Was it your intention to publish Horse Crazy when you wrote it?

GI: Definitely. I was thinking it was time that I wrote a novel. I didn't write a novel until I was 37. I had published a lot of short stories before, but I always wanted to write novels, and I got around 37 and I thought, "if I don't do it now, when am I going to?" I certainly tried to write one a gazillion times previously but had never been able to finish. I was too insecure about the whole thing. I think what happened is that a friend of mine gave me his house in Italy for three months. I didn't really write anything that was worthwhile there, but the fact that he took my desire to write a novel seriously enough ... it made me think, "I CAN do this. If other people think I can, I probably can." I always thought I was a good writer but for years I always thought that I couldn't write the things I wanted to write, or that I could do anything with those things. And that just has to do with stuff from childhood.

LW: What do you like about humanity?

GI: UHHHH ...

LW: Because even though many of your characters have something of a bucolic makeup, it's clear from the writing that you have empathy, or compassion, for them ...

GI: What I generally like is that people are very complex, they're not one thing or another ... they're that, and they're also this. I always like it when someone does something that surprises me, that I wouldn't have thought they would do. I like people that are honest, kind of spontaneous, because generally I think the world is either creeps or assholes. My experience has borne out that some people are just very calculating and they know what they want in life, and they're going to get it no matter who has to pay for it, and then some people are just kind of open. People who are open about things are just much easier to deal with.

LW: What about the Menendez case inspired you as you were writing Resentment?

GI: I thought that they were very sympathetic somehow. If you listen to the trial coverage, the whole country was divided, "did they do it for money or this or that," but to me it seemed very easy to understand. If you think about when you were a child, how dependent you are on your parents, and how controlling they are, and in their case, that had just been extended past the time when parents should control you. Basically. ... They never grew up, they never saw any real options for themselves. It was interesting for me to watch them on TV, or whatever, and to realize, or try to imagine, what sort of process they're going through now, because they obviously haven't thought out any consequences to this, or in Erik's case, anyway, that he would be full of remorse immediately afterwards. It was just interesting.

LW: Did you feel similarly about OJ?

GI: I found everybody involved in that trial repulsive. The Goldmans were just as repulsive as OJ, the prosecution was just as repulsive as the defense. The whole thing, to me, was all image, the exploitation of the racial issues, everybody striking a pose. The first time I saw Fred Goldman with that moustache, I thought, "What's the narrative THERE?" And the sister turning on the waterworks every time they put a camera on her ... I mean, who cares?

LW: Were you excited while you were writing Resentment? Did you have a sense of how good it was going to be?

GI: Yeah, I did, actually. I started in, I think it was 1995. A lot of the time I found myself very freaked out because I was so involved with it, and of course, I wrote a lot of the book between the first and second Menendez trials, so I didn't know what the ultimate outcome would be. Most of the time I was just reliving my own childhood, reliving what it's like to be a kid in a family, and a lot of things that I had locked away came up. I certainly didn't come from a hideous family like them, but every family has some kind of weird pathology, and I had to look back over a very early period of my life that I very rarely think about just to find my way into what these people were experiencing. It was scary, it was really horrifying. Some parts were really unpleasant to write, the murder scene, Frankie kills the guy who picks him up on the street ... a lot of the book was really hard for me to do, but also because it was structurally much more ambitious than my previous novels. I think it's my best work. There were so many technical things that had to be solved, and it's very complicated because it's all these people's stories interwoven and it had to be done according to a very strict timeline, so that everything happening outside the courtroom was corresponding to the trial. These pieces all rub up together and a certain effect is created.

But that didn't cause me mental anguish - it was interesting to work out all those problems, even fun. I felt very free, where even though there was a very precise structure to work out, I just felt that I was doing a lot of things I hadn't attempted before. I know that between Part One and Part Two, I got frozen for a while. I broke off writing about three sections into Part Two, went to South America for three months, left it here, came back and picked it up again. You need to see new things and shake the envelope, shake things up in your life.

LW: Were there any special concerns with possible lawsuits, given that Resentment is based on actual events?

GI: There were a lot of issues. It took a month and a half for it to get out of Legal, I had to hire my own lawyer - (Doubleday's) lawyer was extremely overcautious, in my opinion, about the possibility of lawsuits. The editorial department backed me up completely, so I feel very pleased with how that worked out.

LW: What's next for Gary Indiana?

GI: I don't know what I want to do right now - maybe direct a play or something like that. I want to write another book, but I have to wait until I have an idea that I feel good about. Writers that just finish a book and start another - I don't have an endless depository of obsessions to regurgitate. I have to have a real idea and between things, I have to have some kind of life. I have to have experiences that I learn some things from, to get away from the person I was when I wrote the last book.

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