The weariness, the fever and the fret in New York City

The great Luis Bunuel once said that he made films to remind people that they’re not living in the best of all possible worlds, and it’s surely one of the reasons that Gary Indiana writes novels. So if you have a taste for stories about redemption, nurturing, the luck of a dimwit like Forrest Gump or a child who has the time of her life in heaven once she gets over the shock of being murdered, do not enter Indianaville.

“Do Everything in the Dark” is set in New York, but it is basically a backdrop for a group portrait. There’s no conventional “atmosphere.” A single sentence is enough to establish the setting: “Sleepwalkers armed with credit cards spilled along the sidewalks, filling outdoor tables of fifth-rate pizzerias and bistros -- the East Village’s Kmart parody of Montmartre.” And the collective mood is evoked by a list of everything that no longer excites the group, from drugs to hip-hop, sex to meditation, Rolfing to “ever-refined electronic gadgets that seemed to promise some control over the gathering chaos.”

They know where they are but don’t know where they’re going, and although popular wisdom still decrees that Los Angeles remains the promised land of the emotionally dispossessed in search of self-transformation, it seems that New York, although more expensive and climatically hostile, is drawing ahead.

As in his earlier novel “Resentment,” the lives of Indiana’s leading characters are cunningly interwoven, but especially in “Do Everything in the Dark,” which is written partly in the omniscient third person and partly in the first, Indiana himself the narrator. “People tell me things,” he explains. “I listen. I watch and wait.” In a tour de force of storytelling, he creates the effect of being invisibly present at every scene, watching and listening, a self-acknowledged member of a social microcosm “getting older in an age when everybody had seen too much by the time they were thirty-five.”

On or over the cusp of 40, living with failed love affairs and careers, wrong choices and subsequent regrets have become harder to bear. Almost everybody in “Do Everything” longs to recover, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote more than half a century ago, a time when New York promised “fantastic success and eternal youth,” and “the fulfilled future and the wistful past were mingled in a single gorgeous moment.” In Indianaville, where it’s “every man for himself and God against all,” the one triumphant, monstrous exception is the ruthless Tova Finkelstein. A theater director who knows “how to work the press better than Benjamin Franklin,” she’s not only manufactured an image of herself as warm and generous when she’s really mean and calculating, but has come to believe in it.

The others are not so fortunate or monstrous. With the help of a trust fund and the money he’s made as an actor, Jesse has opted to travel the globe, especially the Third World, with its promise of erotic adventure. Although he often finds it, he hopes for “true love” somewhere. But when he suspects he’s found it with a young Moroccan, he abandons him in panic, knowing it’s “one of those episodes I’ll wonder about for the rest of my life.” He ends up also wondering (like everyone else except Tova Finkelstein), “what do you do to save yourself?” Dilettantish but charismatic Miles, who’s far more persuasive when he “talks” a play or movie script than when he writes it, “tends to forget that a vast distance separates idea from expression” and becomes a restless insomniac. Malcolm, a handsome young black who works at the Virgin Megastore, dreams of making an “experimental” movie, but speedballing guarantees it’ll remain a dream.

Among the women, mysteriously disoriented Anna -- the older woman whom Malcolm loves, and who loves him -- tells her psychiatrist that she simply can’t get her bearings anymore. “I actually carry this stupid Radio Shack device around with me that tells me where I am on earth. It really only tells me where the device is.” Caroline suffers from manic-depressive episodes after failing to repeat the success of her first novel about (what else?) recovering from heroin addiction. “She tried to electrocute herself in Albuquerque,” her lover Denise remarks. “But I tend to think that was more the traditional cry for help.” And Denise herself has consigned an unfulfilled future as a writer to the wistful past by becoming Caroline’s sweetly, hopelessly hopeful minder.

Not surprisingly, several of Indiana’s characters have a past or present history of addiction to amphetamines, heroin, booze or psychiatrists. But the singular appeal of his novel is the way he combines dark brilliance, cauterizing wit, severely elegant prose and a pervasive empathy for lives of lost hope, lost loves, lost opportunities. Less pervasive is a subtext of anger, emerging at unpredictable moments for a direct hit on a deserving target (the New York art world) or an undeserving one (Paul Bowles, accused of failing to remember “anyone who passed through his apartment, unless it was a bona fide celebrity” -- obviously the two of them didn’t click).

In its final pages -- and if you are the kind of reader who likes suspense and surprise, stop here -- “Do Everything” achieves a wry, stoic poetry after the unexpected death of Miles. Death, of course, transfigures the living as well as the dead, and Miles, so often infuriating, so often put down, has to die before most people who knew him recall something wonderfully brave about the way he never openly admitted the pain of failure that he must have felt. In fact, they really loved him. After the memorial service, the narrator, Jesse (touching down in New York for a while), Denise, Caroline (in remission after a season in Bellevue) and a nomadic middle-aged waif called Edith take a cab to the East River. As they cast Miles’ ashes on the waters, Denise comments, “I thought there’d be more.” Then:

“Night falls ink blue by the time a strong enough wind blows up along the river, though the white rocks below glow strangely on their bed of sand.

“And, finally the wind takes him.”

*

From Do Everything in the Dark:

So people do, as the poet remarked, come here in order to live. Our necropolis with anvils of memory chained to every street and building, every tourist postcard view. All its sunsets and bridges and mutilated dawns. Haunted house of mortal dreams, ectoplasms flickering in obsidian windows. People come here to live, after all. You’d think they were here to die....

I will achieve grandeur, proclaimed another poet, but not in this apartment.