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:

What is fascinating, if at times baffling, in Depraved Indifference are the complex financial arrangements of the wealthy, the murky amorality of which eases the transition from licit to dubious to unprincipled and vile. Evelyn’s husband, Warren, apart from his properties, keeps money in an offshore account in the Caymans thanks to his connections with a licentious Saudi sheik; together, he and Evelyn sign over their assets to a series of cutouts to avoid paying penalties in a civil litigation suit. They file insurance claims for fake burglaries and damages from fires they set themselves; they even cook up a scam for America’s Bicentennial that gets them briefly into the White House, with the justification, “it’s a country full of morons, we really owe it to ourselves to make some money off them.”

What Indiana portrays in place of this myth is a kind of pathological integument binding together nodes of “normalcy,” where the deficits and obsessions characteristic of the criminal appear in an acceptable guise

In a profoundly outré but very suggestive 1935 essay on mimesis and entomology, Roger Caillois coined the term “teleplasty” to suggest the way bodily forms might migrate across space. Indiana invoked this same notion several decades later in one of his Village Voice columns, concluding that “some mimetic creatures fool their own kind well enough to eat each other.” His three crime novels are an exhaustive consideration of such creatures, and they show the monstrous side of the American ideal of the self-made man: what we might call the self-making man, stripped of any abiding attributes, shedding his skin at will to suit his surroundings. The traits he appropriates are pulled prêt-à-porter from the utopian pornography of mass media, with its perfunctory and hence readily imitable models of success, sophistication, intelligence. He is a response to a peculiar condition of our era: the hardly realizable sense of possibility that capitalism gives rise to as it multiplies the quantity and luxuriousness of its temptations. All the things one might own, all the fun one might have, are a spur and an affront to the pure egotistical potency that is the only thing left when generosity and compassion are either absent or burned away, as they easily may be in a culture where “winning” is the ne plus ultra.