Kill Dick Attempts the Great OxyContin Novel
In Luke Goebel’s much-hyped novel Kill Dick, a rich dropout is hooked on OxyContin, a drug manufactured by her lawyer dad’s biggest client. Aptly set in a strange and soporific Los Angeles, it captures the degradation of American society and interior life.
Luke Goebel’s Kill Dick is a novel about LA, drugs, and the fruitless enmeshment of art and capital. (Katie Jones / Variety via Getty Images)
Los Angeles is a city of ten million people, each of us rubbing our eyes, filtering our water, paying our parking tickets. Doing our daily back-and-forths on the freeways, trying to outrun whatever reaper we see in the rearview mirror. The real and the imaginary lock together here, like the jaws of a vice, and some of us wind up getting crushed. Occasionally, before the crushing happens, one of us gets a novel out.
“The Los Angeles novel does not explain. It presents,” writes the novelist Luke Goebel in an essay about his new book, Kill Dick. It is “reality’s cousin,” because in LA “the distance between narrative and reality collapses.”
Much of Kill Dick’s press coverage has focused on the impressive guerrilla marketing campaign that preceded its release. One element of this campaign was the stenciling of the book’s provocative title on what feels like every concrete surface in Los Angeles. Another element was a trendy soirée photographed for a spread in the lifestyle magazine Flaunt. Goebel has also reviewed his own book at least thrice so far, first in the Pittsburgh Review of Books and again in Literary Hub and Crime Reads. Two of the auto-reviews emphasize Kill Dick’s status as an LA novel. It’s a clever bit of promotion, but possibly overkill, since Kill Dick announces itself as an LA novel on its first page.
The novel opens with a description of the wind whipping across a bouquet of place-names — Hollywood, Mulholland, Burbank, Sherman Oaks, Beverly Hills, Bel-Air — to finally tickle the toes of our narrator, Susie Vogelman, reclining on a pool chair at her parents’ Brentwood estate. A recent art school dropout hopelessly hooked on OxyContin, Susie is a lot to handle (laudatory). She is also a lot to handle (derogatory). That the year is 2016 is not stated outright but is nonetheless obvious: there’s an election on, pitting “the Female Candidate” against “the Orange Candidate,” and also nobody is vaping.
Susie’s dad is the kind of guy who “lets his mouth hang open just the slightest bit to seem vigorous, as if he’s been chasing a gazelle through the Serengeti, when really he’s just got high cholesterol from the pasta sauce at Spago.” He’s filthy rich, he’s paranoid, he’s a “brute” — and he’s the personal attorney for Dick Sickler, the billionaire who manufactures Oxy.
Susie hates her dad. She hates Dick Sickler. And sometimes she hates her ex–best friend, Dick’s daughter Faia. To prove that she’s better than all these people — or maybe just to get their attention — Susie decides to be a famous artist. But it turns out becoming a famous artist is hard even when your dad is rich, so she develops a heavy Oxy habit instead. “That’s what family did,” she explains at one point, “stole your buzz, itched your asshole, and ruined the power of your authentic vision.” Addiction is basically her birthright.
Susie sure loves Oxy. It makes her droop and fold in half, dribble wet cereal from the side of her mouth, worry about her smell. Judging by her exquisitely off-kilter narration (which bounces between first- and third-person), it also makes her feel amazing:
By the pool now, Susie’s mind was blooming very, very slowly. Words in her head were watery, and she sloshed them around, and the words dissolved, came undone. “Ooh ooh, ah ah!” She should call someone, she thought. She wished she had some friends in the neighborhood.
To read Kill Dick is to slip into Susie’s poppy-washed mind. I liked it there, but it also exhausted me.
Main Character Syndrome
In Susie’s internal monologue, vapidity often comes dressed up as profundity, and vice versa. Take this question, for example, which occurs to Susie while she’s doped to the gills in the back of a chauffeured Bentley: “Was there anything central to the integrity of life, or was it all just passing fancy, infinitudes of luxury, gauchely driven toward silent nothingness?” Whether this sentence makes you nod or cringe depends on how you choose to focus your eyes, like Ludwig Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit. Either way you get tricked.
From the start Susie is at pains to disclose that she is the most unreliable of narrators. Everything we read in Kill Dick is a “novelization” of the true events she says befell her during her year of getting blotto in the sun — a period of time that just happens to coincide with Susie becoming an infamous art-world provocateur. Her “novelization” is an attempt at recording “how I, both an enfant terrible and an ingénue, was subjected to so much horror and engaged with it all.” Is she lying? Yes, undoubtedly. But her story is what the kids these days call spiritually true.
Here are that story’s basic elements. Drug users keep showing up dead in LA motels. Nothing unusual about that, but what grabs the public’s attention is that their bodies are displayed in grisly tableaux that recall works of installation art — nipples are cut from chests and placed over eyes, hair is chopped off, stuff like that. Meanwhile, other weird shit keeps happening, too, including a mass poisoning at the Emmys that causes the who’s who of Hollywood to barf all over their ball gowns. Also, Susie’s favorite professor from NYU assumes the name of his drug-addicted twin brother and moves to LA to establish a fake rehab clinic. There he meets a gender-questioning ex–Jehovah’s Witness named Royal-Lee, the only decent person in the whole book, from whom Susie buys her drugs. And Susie’s mom is in a sex cult with Dick Sickler called the Church of White Illumination.
Suffice to say, there’s a lot going on.
Either the church or the fake rehab is responsible for everything interesting in the world, from the drug users’ deaths to the poisoning at the Emmys to the ascendance of the Orange Candidate. Or maybe they’re not responsible for anything at all. Susie doesn’t know. Getting to the truth of things doesn’t matter much to her. What matters is how “to make this story mine — make it work, bend fate to my will, manifest a Campbellian hero’s journey, or a bright Hermetic dawn.”
Susie’s major talent is figuring out how to make herself the main character of a story everyone is already telling. This is a talent she and Luke Goebel seem to share. There is a clear parallel between Goebel’s book-promo street art and his novel’s climax, a set piece that sees Susie temporarily relocating the residents of Skid Row so that she can sign her name in golden spray paint on each of their tents, then reopen the place as an “art walk.” Art imitates life, reality mimics satire. Wisdom apes naivety. Irony becomes sincerity becomes irony again. Everything connects to itself in a perfectly chaotic swirl, like the loop at LAX. Or like the novel’s twin brothers, who trade places with one another multiple times as the story goes on, toggling back and forth like binary code.
“Art isn’t real, ideas aren’t real. People aren’t real. The world isn’t real,” Susie says near the end of the novel, in the closest thing she has to an epiphany. The only thing that’s real is “the media overload.” This statement, too, is a Wittgensteinian duck-rabbit. When I read it yesterday, it struck me as asinine. Rereading it now, it strikes me as wise. Tomorrow it’ll probably seem asinine again.
It’s hard for me to separate Kill Dick’s eye-grabbing publicity campaign from Kill Dick itself, and maybe that’s the point. Goebel’s “intervention” — to borrow an art-world term that Susie delights in using — is more ambitious than what’s contained in his novel’s three hundred pages. Susie’s “novelization” includes all the real-world noise that surrounds Kill Dick, all the hype and energy and chatter.
Like a good actor, Kill Dick hits its marks, stays true to the script, controls its eyeline to avoid spiking the camera. Is it real? You look up from the page to watch the palm trees swaying in front of a sky the color of grapefruit juice. Of course it’s not real. That doesn’t mean it can’t hurt you.