"Reading delivers on the promise that sex raises but hardly ever can fulfill--getting larger 'cause you're entering another person's language, cadence, heart and mind."

This work by Chris Kraus, the first I've read, is difficult to wrap one's head around. It's easy to read, on one hand, due in large part by Kraus's wonderful prose style. Paradoxically, on the other, she's integrated a number of theorists and high/continental/french/etc. theory into the narrative, as well as a number of arcane 80s New York artworld literati references that might taste more than a little indulgent for the average reader (the "average reader" being one that Harold Bloom would look down upon). Nevertheless, despite the fact that I caught most of the references blended into Kraus's text, the ones I didn't recognize (or, on a separate matter, understand at all) did not bother or interrupt my reading experience. Although Joan Hawkins in her "Afterword" to the book valorizes and centers the theory as the primary driver of the fiction (and vice-versa), I found that 'understanding' the theory (like you might have to do in a seminar) was a non-issue. What is really at issue for Kraus in I Love Dick is the this-ness of her life, its many connections, correspondences, restrictions, frustrations, desires, failures, etc. I believe her life at the moment of writing and its confluence of her age, marriage, career, body, gender, and sexual desire was the impetus, if not for Kraus's authorial intent itself, for the pleasure hovering over her words and turns of phrase. I'm not sure why prose of the "self" is so compelling (i.e. look at Knausgaard's works and success) when it lays bare the more abject nooks of the authorial "life." The more transparent, or at least seemingly transparent, the life is on the page the more we greedily consume its pages. For this reason I found the less theoretical/more traditional epistolary content of the book the most exciting, such as the opening salvo of letters tracing Sylvère and Chris's experimentation with this "new literary form." As opposed to other texts that approach the subject of 'female abjection' in the mode of hetero-sexual desire (I'm thinking mainly of Ernaux's Passion simple), Kraus manages to write sexual desire with spectacular nuance, such as when she reflects on Dick's ambivalent attitude to her pursuit of his passion:

"What do you want?" you asked again. "I want to sleep with you." Two weeks ago I'd written you that note saying the idea of spending time alone with you was a vision of purehappiness and pleasure. On the phone you'd said, "I won't say no" when I asked what you thought, but all the reasons, factors, desire splintered in a hundred hues like sunlight through a psychedelic prism came crashing with a thud when you asked me: "Why?"

Finally, the question of veracity vis-à-vis Kraus's relationship to Dick is one that seems to have troubled a lot of people. To be sure, some of Chris's behaviour is a little perturbing and might amount to harassment--in general she definitely oversteps the social boundaries delimited by a contemporary civil PC discourse which demands respect and polity at all times--but the truth-value and moral judgements formed in response to the text are beside the point. Kraus writes a certain truth into language here and it is one that is at once political, theoretical, fictional, and above all, absolutely engrossing.