Do Everything in the Dark
A dark yet compassionate comedy of art aspirations and friendships come to naught.
First published in 2003, Gary Indiana’s turn-of-the-millennium novel traces the lives of a loosely connected group of New York artists and the dissolution of their scene.
During the summer of 2001, the narrator of Do Everything in the Dark, a gallery curator, receives intermittent dispatches from his far-flung friends—many of whom resemble well-known figures in the art and intellectual worlds—who are spread out across the globe, from Istanbul to Provincetown to Santa Fe. Seeking various reprieves from a changed New York, the long-festering, glossed-over incompatibilities of these aging bohemians blossom into exotic and unbearable relief. Beneath the contemporary excesses Indiana chronicles, we can see the outlines of the earlier…