Few writers are as keenly alive to absurdity or write with as sharp a pen as Gary Indiana, whose new essay collection, Fire Season, spans almost forty years of stellar criticism ... His interests are expansive ... When I was at university in the mid-Eighties and setting out in the world soon thereafter, Indiana’s sensibility, and indeed his canon, were formative for my cohort, and it’s enormously pleasurable to revisit his brilliant mind ... Perhaps the central feature of Indiana’s writing remains its elegant and astringent wit. At times, this can look like nastiness; but just as the difference between the erotic and the pornographic is said to be that the latter is gratuitous, so too is strong critique distinct from simple nastiness in being purposeful ... Indiana also turns his stinging clarity on living subjects ... Some pieces may read differently now than when they were first published, as the urgency of the avant-garde has been subsumed by the inescapability of mass media. And it’s true that Indiana’s work can feel not wholly contemporary, insofar as it refuses ever to be nice. This, thank goodness, ensures its timelessness.

The intellect of playwright, novelist, essayist, and critic Gary Indiana is notoriously brawny and sure-footed, ranging across, to borrow his words, 'the queasy context of the modern world' with an assurance and elegance largely unfamiliar to our era’s torrential toadyism and its twin, cancellation ... A triumphant collection ... Appreciated on the level of his sentences alone, Indiana is a lapidary wielding a straight razor ... Fire Season is in fact full of admiration, even terrific tenderness, for many of its subjects, proving throughout what an exacting reader he is of character. No contradictions are left unturned ... What becomes clear in reading this collection is that American culture is so habituated to bright-siding, readers can lose sight of the fact that venom, administered appropriately, is medicine ... Giggling, shuddering, even at times a little nauseous, I found myself only once dissenting from Indiana, not because of his point-blank candor, but because I perceived him to humble himself uncharacteristically and unnecessarily ... Indiana’s hungry readers will devour these essays and lick their chops, feeling satisfied as they wait for more from him.

Indiana inhabits his role with fangs on. His famously antagonistic addresses to the reader...are as calculated as a Rainer Werner Fassbinder film: nothing is truly raw, disdain for bourgeois values is inbuilt and every depiction feels art-directed with decadent grime in mind ... This self-consciousness protects Indiana from feeling wooed by his own persona, as do the stresses of writing seriously in an economically precarious time ... Fire Season highlights his dogged reportage and erudite analysis far more than his shock value ... This latest release is less a surprise than a rich record of overlapping eras of history – ones coloured both by Indiana’s prophetic mind and the dread we bring to historical events in retrospect ... Fire Season is nothing if not high-minded ... As much a moralist as a bad boy, Indiana understands that the two positions enable each other, that they provide balance and nuance to what might be mutually thin shticks. This is, and has always been, his subtext: he raves like a wigged-out drunk so he can impart a message of compassion and progressivism, and the need for this acrobatic balance is an indictment of society at large.

Indiana’s intention is not disarmament. The premise of many of the longer essays...is that, contrary to what we learned in history class, the American political and judicial systems are defined by callous violence and absurd theater. In his reporting, he shocks by letting people and events speak for themselves ... For readers like me who recognize those names but know little of their work, and have never heard of the dozen more artists reviewed, Indiana’s breadth is intoxicating. You can’t help but make a list. And at a time when even premier critics...waste their best sentences on Twitter, Indiana’s ecstatic affection for (relatively) old and obscure masterpieces are a welcome departure from interaction-driven criticism ... There is tremendous range in the near-forty pieces in Fire Season, and two of the most fascinating essays are roving formal experiments ... Even when clarity is sacrificed, it’s exhilarating to witness him wrestling with things instead of having already figured them out ... Indiana’s style is frequently described as cool and bitchy, but it’s also playful and vulnerable; his attention to the subtle pitches of syntax and humanity is untarnished by the bleakness of his perspective. Reading him is pleasurable in the way eavesdropping on the rants and raves of a brilliant, tasteful, disaffected friend is ... In the insane, amoral world of Fire Season, Indiana is an acerbic and hilarious guide, guaranteed.

Here, and elsewhere, Indiana is a staunch defender of the formally unusual, the writing that resists easy flogging ... Indiana has little common cause with the take-meisters because his stories are quite wide in emotional tone, rooted both in his experience and a political conscience ... It is the inescapable density of life that propels Indiana, a sense that experience deserves to be written about, but also that writing must not dissolve into the weak gas of opinion ... Indiana’s work is sensitive to the endlessness of the feeling within the endlessness of the pain. Things actually happen—life is not a wacky accretion of characters who conveniently embody that week’s intellectual whims ... To remember, again and again, the real that defines the surreal is an almost unbearable burden, and also the reason to write, for Indiana ... Maddeningly, it is not indicated in Fire Season where the essays were first published ... Indiana’s reputation as mean is such an odd categorization for someone who is so capable of feeling the struggles of his subjects, to see their risk as his own.

Verbal artistry is in plentiful supply in this spirited collection ... Each entry is marked by vivid imagery and the author’s scathing, eloquent wit ... Trenchant and thought-provoking, this is a great look at a gifted writer’s mind.