Skip to main content

Review 4: I Love Dick by Chris Kraus

I Love Dick
I Love Dick is a book whose title feels like a deliberate trick to make you aware of other people looking at you when reading it on a train. I’m certain that it will have been a publishing decision to catch the eye. I look forward to seeing the same publisher’s follow-up hits, Eat All Puppies and I’m Not Racist, But…

Publishing chicanery aside, ILD is, in its through-line, about a woman who develops a mostly one-sided infatuation with a man called Dick (get it? The title was a phallusy). But it’s an indirect plotline, with plenty of other ruminations about gender, art, politics and more thrown in too.

“Plotline” may not be quite the correct term to use, given that the basis for the book is essentially autobiographical, and it reads like a memoir in the clothes of literature – or possibly the other way around. You’re certainly aware that these are real people being discussed, none more so than the author, Chris Kraus, who brings her whole self to bear on the page, with all the messiness that genuinely makes up a person. In a literary world where characters generally are well-rounded, with clearly defined motivations, this stands out strongly and is refreshing.

Kraus’ writing is clear and self-assured, which is just as well since she often sprints into complex philosophical discussions from a standing start. And what starts out as a series of letters and short stories that she and her husband directed to Dick ends up as a form of address to herself, letting her more fully explore her feelings towards Dick, her husband, herself and the world in a safe space. What starts as infatuation ends up almost replicating a therapist’s office, which is really neat to watch.

The book is at its best in the second half, with damning analyses of women’s dismissal from art history, right up to the 90s art worlds of New York and Los Angeles. She slowly comes to the realisation that she has sidelined herself to support her husband’s career across their whole marriage, and puts it into a wider pattern that is really powerful and important.

I have to be honest and say that I didn’t overly enjoy the book, but that’s mostly a matter of personal taste. Kraus describes and endorses an artworld bubble that to me comes over as self-absorbed and pretentious, but which others may find more interesting. I also can’t say I’m completely comfortable with the manner in which she pursues Dick. But the questions this raises about the lack of respect and representation of women in that same artworld are as vital as in any other industry, and equally the societal factors that dictate a woman’s behaviour in developing romantic attachments are rarely explored in this style or depth.


---

This is my fourth book review of 100 to raise money for Refuge, the domestic abuse charity. If you liked this review, or just want to help out, please donate on the link below!

JustGiving - Sponsor me now!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Review 34: The Long Song by Andrea Levy

I’ve read a few books dealing with black slavery as part of this challenge. It’s interesting how each one looks at it through a slightly different lens, adding slightly different perspectives to the whole picture. In The Long Song , the thing that rings as much through the book as the horror and inhumanity of slavery is the sense of humour between the slaves themselves. It felt odd to laugh out loud while reading this, but there are plenty of times I did. I guess that this in itself is important – humour is an essential and universal human trait, so if we deny the slaves’ humour in recounting their stories, maybe it’s another way of denying their humanity all over again. I tried rewriting this about five times to make me sound less like a pseudo-intellectual jerksack, but this is the best I could do, I’m afraid. Anyway, TLS is set in a Jamaican sugar plantation in the early 19th century, and spans the periods just before and after slavery was abolished in the British Empir...

Review 9: The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie

The Portable Veblen is an odd read, and possibly not in the ways you’d expect. Picking it up, I assumed it was some sort of sci-fi or magic realist novel. Was a Veblen some sort of futuristic gun? A translation device? A highly treatable but somewhat embarrassing rash? In fact, as with so much in this world, it really only serves to highlight my troglodyte-level ignorance. Apparently Veblen is a reference to Thorstein Veblen, a Norwegian socialist and sociologist living in America in the late 1800s. He essentially decried capitalism and proposed an alternative system to Marxism, and it is after this prominent thinker that TPV ’s main character, Veblen, is named. For me, the novel is really about contradictions between people and between families as they try to adjust from being purely individual to being part of a wider group. How do you decide what to compromise on and what to retain? What is an unhealthy hangover from your upbringing and what is a genuinely core part of ...

Review 25: With the End in Mind: Dying, Death, and Wisdom in an Age of Denial by Dr. Kathryn Mannix

There’s not much more predictable than death. Not the exact nature of anyone’s death, but the fact that we’re all going to hit the doom saloon at one point or another. And yet we fear it; avoid preparing for it; create unhelpful taboos around it. On a scale of dopey things to do, this ranks right up there with Morris dancing. This is one of the key messages of Dr. Kathryn Mannix’s With the End in Mind . Through a number of examples from her time working in palliative care, she explores what death really looks like and how to come to terms with it in an age increasingly concerned with preserving life at all costs. There are some genuinely moving points in the book, but for me none was more so than the first time she watches a consultant describe the dying process to a woman with a terminal condition, who is scared of the pain and loss of dignity she believes it to include. Mannix carefully recounts the process for us to benefit from too: gradually increasing tiredness, regular cycl...