“I was desperate to write a novel, but I didn’t have a story. Whenever I tried to write fiction it was all about my own inner bullshit.”

Martin Puryear’s sculptures, the United States’ official contribution to the ongoing 2019 Venice Biennale, stand tall, oblique, coyly mute.

  Sex, hypocrisy, solitude, loss, the punitive affinities that swallow the self—these are Gary Indiana’s themes, jingling through his books like money in Balzac. But rumbling beneath the malice is a melancholy yearning, a mind groping vuln…