The first novel from art critic and experimental filmmaker Chris Kraus, I Love Dick was originally published in 1997 by Semiotext(e), an independent press which also happens to be co-edited by…Chris Kraus. Probably no other publisher would have touched it, and thank God (or Chris Kraus?) for that.

Let me give you some idea why. In the novel, a fictional version of the author spends one sexless night with the titular Dick, a well-known theorist, and becomes exponentially, embarrassingly, obsessed with him. She calls this nuit chez Dick a “conceptual fuck,” and one assumes it registers pretty high on the Conceptual Fuck Richter Scale because she goes on to write a terrific series of confessional letters to him in collaboration with another man: her husband. A husband she’s no longer sleeping with. The letters are ostensibly a game, until they’re not at all. And all of this coincides with a strange and, at times, emotionally exhausting ride across America from the California desert to the New York avant-garde art scene. It is a trip.

Salacious plot points aside, the chief thrill of reading I Love Dick comes from how inventively it rewrites representations of the dreaded female inner life. Books by women are sometimes condescendingly described as intimate, inconsequential, or limited to domestic subjects—like the rest of women’s work—making them the literary equivalent of a patchwork quilt. In I Love Dick, Kraus takes a seam ripper to those criticisms. “How much information about one subject can you juggle in two hands?” she asks. Importantly, her book isn’t an answer. It’s hypothesis—the fun part.

Fiction and autobiography, theory and scandal, humor and pathos, the diaristic and the dialectical—Kraus reaches for them all to test how much insight they can offer. No matter how “small” or “limited” the picture seems, “the trick is to discover Everything within the frame.” There are whole worlds in there.

If you think that great writing should be about more than intellectual gymnastics, you can exhale now. I Love Dick delivers practical life lessons too. Here’s one: in order to learn you have to fail, right? So I mean it in the best way when I say that Kraus has fashioned an ode to personal and professional failure, bolding and underlining the key notion that, in the eyes of history, if you’re a woman you are all but destined to be forgotten.

Take her description of an installation by artist Eleanor Antin:

Through the far-left window a middle-aged woman was painting on a large canvas.…It was an ordinary scene (though its very ordinariness made it subversively utopian: how many pictures from the 50s do we have of nameless women painting late into the night and living lives?).…I felt a rush of empathetic curiosity about the lives of the unfamous, the unrecorded desires and ambitions of artists who had been here too. What’s the ratio of working artists to the sum total of art stars? A hundred or a thousand?

Kraus counts herself a member of that unremembered constellation—always the plus one at art parties, never the guest of honor. In one of her letters to Dick, she writes, “I tried my best but [my film] still failed.” And then: “Is there any greater freedom than not caring anymore what certain people in New York think of me?”

I read the better part of I Love Dick during many long Toronto subway rides to and from my desk job. (I read faithfully, like a penitent, when I can’t or won’t make time to write.) It was just a book but with that title you might as well be hoisting a billboard. I received a few stares and practiced not caring. Mostly, I pretended to be Rihanna.

On one commute the woman across from me fingered her rosary and I imagined (hoped) that she was praying for my soul. Not because I needed to be saved but because I felt so strongly that there was nothing left worth saving.

Which is why, when I think back on it, it seems likeliest the woman wasn’t staring at all but looking right through me. Because if that’s true, what else is there to console myself with except the promise of freedom by invisibility? As Kraus puts it, “Once you’ve accepted total obscurity you may as well do what you want.” After that I started seeing last hurrahs everywhere.

One night while the fictional Chris Kraus was feverishly writing to Dick in an Oklahoma motel, I was watching two women named Thelma & Louise take another vital road trip across my TV. I was only going to watch the first half hour or so, just until Louise shoots Thelma’s rapist dead. (Later, a giddily deranged Thelma will spit one of the film’s most satisfying lines: “You should have shot him in the dick!”) Inevitably, I watched the whole thing.

When it seems like the two friends have exhausted every mile of open road, Thelma tells Louise that she can never go back to the banal indignity of her old life. “Something’s crossed over in me,” she says. “I can’t go back. I mean, I just couldn’t live.”

Well, she didn’t go back. She didn’t live either.

But she tried.

I Love Dick detonated something in me, but it’s been a slow demolition. With each quiet, contained blast I grow more sure that by recognizing our own billboards of desire and failure, and perhaps even finding some dignity there, we are also moving the culture towards the “subversive utopia” that so many women, artists or not, hoped and hope for. When I quit that desk job in November, with no real plans to speak of, I remembered I Love Dick. That Kraus, who considered herself a failure, could write this book at all gives me a shot of courage, and makes me less willing to wait my turn to really live.

***

This is the first of an ongoing series, produced in partnership with Tumblr Storyboard, to highlight Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here. We’ll publish our favorites every Friday for the next ten weeks.

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The book takes place in 2005 and 2006 and follows Catt and Paul, first on their individual trajectories and then, the duo having met, through the course of their relationship. It begins with Catt, 44, a cultural critic and teacher with a small and marginal following, on the run in Mexico from a man she met on a bondage website. Ostensibly he’s out to kill her. She returns, after a while, to her home in L.A., as the threat of the man from the website fades into the background, before moving on to Albuquerque. There she’s bought some vacant condos, and plans to refurbish and rent them—an enjoyable foray for Catt into the “real” world.

Then we’re introduced to Paul, 39, a recovering alcoholic and drug addict who’s recently been paroled from prison. After earlier incarcerations for multiple DUIs, his most recent 16-month stint was for defrauding Halliburton, during a binge, of less than a thousand dollars. He moves to Albuquerque to escape his crack-smoking boss, where he’s hired by Catt to manage her rentals. Before long, they’re romantically involved.

Chris Kraus

The novel proceeds linearly once Catt and Paul’s backgrounds have been established. The prose is not beautiful—Kraus is not a stylist. But it is functional, and unobtrusive, and what it lacks in imagination it makes up for in sheer readability. It is nearly transparent. Frequent shifts in perspective, often sudden, from one of the leads to the other, and the occasional dips into minor characters—Tommy, a fraudulent accountant and blackmailer; Terry, a poet friend of Catt’s; Jerry, the self-medicating boss Paul flees to Albuquerque to escape—keep things interesting. The narrative swings deftly between them all, never losing momentum, and even the minor characters are fully, if briefly, realized.

It’s partly the dynamism of these characters that keeps the novel moving quickly. There are also dramatic tonal shifts throughout—something akin to channel surfing—though far from being stumbling blocks, they also propel the narrative. From the paranoid opening chapter, Catt’s flight from “her killer” (which draws heavily from thriller conventions), to a house flipping HGTV program, to a woeful prison tale, to a domestic drama and a legal procedural: the novel is all over the place, and that is a good part of the fun. Summer of Hate is engaged with a broad swath of the culture—it is “associative,” as Catt describes herself. “Without culture, the subject is isolate.” And in some ways—structurally, tonally—that associative bent works excellently.

The instances when Kraus’s associating involves the political are the novel’s weakest; unfortunate, because Summer of Hate aspires to the political. The list of topics touched on is a long one—extraordinary rendition, nationalism and xenophobia, illegal immigration, racial profiling, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, climate change, Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s famous pink underwear.

The references come fast and frequent, and the Bush-era outrage is palpable. But the novel never becomes involved in it. Concerns about the justice system, particularly with regard to class inequity, are central to the plot, but never fully investigated. Events simply happen, are observed and taken at their face. We learn that there are places in America where NPR broadcasts don’t reach. In those places, Fresh Air is supplanted by, predictably enough, Bible Talk. The places where you only get Bible Talk are bad, as are torture, the PATRIOT Act, the war in Iraq, and the massive post-9/11 proliferation of American flag lapel pins. Agreeing with these views doesn’t make them more interesting, or useful to this novel.

So it is unfortunate that Catt and Paul’s relationship is strung along by what purports to be, but is not, an indictment of the “prison-industrial complex.” The exploration of the class distinction, and its educational corollary, between Catt and Paul is, if not groundbreaking, wholly engaging. Particularly when coupled with nuanced portraits of life in A.A. and the strain that financial debt can place on interpersonal relations. But the nuance and the engagement come only in cultural contexts, and that limitation relegates Summer of Hate to the merely good.

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