Culture

The Fine Art of Fucking Up by Cate Dicharry

The Fine Art of Fucking Up BY Cate Dicharry. The Unnamed Press. Paperback, 256 pages. $16.
The cover of The Fine Art of Fucking Up

Is the phrase “a farce set in art school” redundant? Cate Dicharry’s first novel takes that view, and while this position could easily be insufferable as well as unnecessary—hitting the broad side of a barn is not exactly a daring challenge—she makes it an unvarnished delight. This is an especially wise authorial move given how well-worked a genre the campus novel is—and how brave or even foolhardy it is to follow the likes of Kingsley Amis, Mary McCarthy, and Randall Jarrell. Yet contrary to the opinion of some (“Last rites for the campus novel”), the genre is not over, or even near over. Like romance and tragedy, the academy is not a finite resource. These genres are vehicles; what matters, as always, is who’s driving the car and where it’s headed.

The target audience of The Fine Art of Fucking Up—“fine art,” get it?—is thinking readers who want cultivated entertainment and are not above a book that situates itself in the defiantly low precincts of pure fun. It is, to use a descriptor of an all-but-vanished humor category, a hoot. This is the involuntary sound that issues when your insider knowledge meets the sharp end of the writer’s deflating pin. Sometimes Dicharry’s satire winks at the excesses of the academy. (The slyly ridiculous university’s strategic plan is titled Reviving the Promise: Great Opportunities, Bold Expectations, and it’s more than possible she copied this verbatim from an extant brochure, the kind that features glossy photos of young people—always in a carefully selected rainbow of hues, and always wearing wide smiles as they hoist their life-changing institution’s banner—that might as well come from a stock agency except for their particular kind of generality.) Other times she lances common experience, as with the waiter who would rather be anywhere else but nonetheless must hover table-side, playing eager concern by a script: “I see we’ve got beverages already. Are we all set to order or are we going to need a couple of minutes?” The narrator notes that “somehow he makes the first person plural sound like an insult.”

Call it beach reading for the library carrel.

Her creation—and, it is insinuated, one not all that made-up , since the success of a lampoon depends on its ability to come uncomfortably close to the hairline crack between invention and reality—is the fictional midwestern School of Visual Arts. It is the kind of place where no vapid performance piece goes unrecognized as an important Statement on Something: there’s the protester who wears a body suit upon which are glued oversized male sex organs, no doubt made of papier-mâché; indeed, anyone who wishes to mount a protest at the school must apply to the administration to do so. This is a tidbit hypocrisy among a smorgasbord of them, large and small, perfectly turned and less-than-fully-cooked alike. The MFA candidate who is simply too addled to remember to post the required artist’s statement for her thesis show is credited with a laudable act of aesthetic noncompliance, “expressive and literal . . . poignant and adroit.”

Dicharry’s finest cuts are reserved for the sort of empty gesture that is a certain type of celebrated international architect’s greatest achievement: his fuck-you to the people who must build, work, or live in his “work of art.” Indeed, the building in The Fine Art of Fucking Up is its most believable malevolent character.

The SVA is housed in one of those acts of aggression by an award-winning architect who has come to believe his own hype and now can do no wrong, no matter how wrong: it is the analogue of the faculty's own emperor-has-no-clothes artistic product, “more implied than actual, more formless mechanism than physical object, the architectural features capturing theoretical ideas rather than physical properties”; the German architect's intention of creating “a structure discontinuous from habitat” bears disastrous consequences at the dramatic turning point of the novel. The river over which it is perilously cantilevered is flooding, threatening the one true work of art in the school: an early Jackson Pollock. Saving it—along with her future as a self-aware adult, ambivalent wife of a man who wants a child but settles instead for taking in a Chinese exchange student for practice as a father—falls to Nina Lanning, the school's administrative coordinator. Needless to say, she is an artist manqué, perhaps the only observer who stands both in, and far enough outside, the ludicrous fray that is her institution to be able to comment trenchantly on the absurd goings-on (an ousted professor lurks disgruntled in the building, his olfactory terrorism the offstage frying of bacon). So she does, taking down any number of contemporary pretensions; this is the book’s prime pleasure, glossy but not entirely depthless. The only thing Nina has little perspective on is the state of her own heart.

She is not quite as outrageously fucked up as her boss, who has convinced herself the auto-replies of an aging romance-novel cover model are meant for her alone. It is a bit of a shame that Dicharry lays on the ostensible humor in the circumstances of a main character: satire is such a slender vessel it is sensitive to overweight. Truth is already incredible enough; a growing pileup of overwrought inanities risks sinking the novel. To be sure, comedy is very, very hard to write. Every time Dicharry made me laugh, which was often, I felt like she deserved a trophy. She gathered a nice little shelf of them.

It is perhaps the author’s only sizable mistake to contaminate the satiric purity of the form by admixing Nina Lanning’s internal apocalypse; it is as if one type of novel had collided with another, and parts from each are wedged inside the other. The attempt to add human depth paradoxically diminishes the magnitudes that are already there. A good solid knock on the head of intellectual pretension has an emotional charge of its own: The thought of almost losing a Pollock is soulful enough for one book. “This magnificent painting, the nascence of a brilliant career, right here in front of us, dangling precariously over a pool of sepsis.” Now there is some good symbolism for a work about art school. Real art is placed in the way of mortal danger; student rehearsals of hypothetical later creation are treated with worshipful reverence.

Given contemporary fiction’s fetish for watchworks complexity, a relatively straightforward novel is refreshing. Something that sets itself a single task and accomplishes it. That is an intellectual marvel of another sort: a smart move.

Melissa Holbrook Pierson is the author of four works of nonfiction, including The Place You Love Is Gone (Norton, 2006); her fifth, The Secret History of Kindness, will be published in May.