Indiana’s work is abundant and motley: there is video art, poetry, plays, a monograph on Andy Warhol, several years’ worth of art criticism for The Village Voice, a memoir, and of course, the novels. If one cared to assign all this an overarching theme—the exercise is dubious, but no less so than reviewing in general—it might be, put bluntly, bullshit. Concretely, bullshit in America: the way clichés from the media, pop culture, so-called high culture, and self-help books are grafted into conversation and seep into awareness, obstructing the possibility of an individual understanding of the world and oneself, and, in the process, perverting any human drives that might be called authentic, bending them in a direction consonant with that weird amalgamation of capitalism, rapacity, entitlement, egotism, and whininess that forms the marrow of what passes for moral awareness in much of the United States. The contempt inspiring this vision was well in evidence in such early dramatic works as The Roman Polanski Story, with its grotesque shifts from hyperbole to euphemism, all phrased in a kind of détourned Leave It to Beaver-ese that disarms any programmed sanctimoniousness the audience might bring to the appalling highlights of the director’s life: