I Love Dick by Chris Kraus, book review: Sex, lies and the shocking truth

Kraus's "novel" was first published in the US in 1997 and has become recognised as both an influential feminist text and a key intervention in the debate over where life-writing ends and fiction begins

This books comes with a reputation, though it's not the one you might expect from the title, which leaps from the gorgeous, faux-innocent cover. Chris Kraus's "novel" was first published in the US in 1997 and has become recognised as both an influential feminist text and a key intervention in the debate over where life-writing ends and fiction begins. The novel's "story" is simply told: that Kraus, a late-thirties experimental film-maker living in the shadow of her theorist husband, Sylvère Lotringer, becomes infatuated with Dick, an expat sociologist, after the three of them spend a drunken, flirty evening at Dick's California home.

Chris is certain that she and Dick have made a connection, and she and Sylvère enliven their now sexless marriage by expanding on her obsession in dozens of letters they write to Dick, but don't post, though we get to read them. What starts out as a delirious game turns into an intriguing dual self-analysis, and then, when they do approach the unsurprisingly unnerved Dick, the makings of a typically Californian art project.

Part of the original shock of Kraus's book is that this was all real: Dick, the "rock & roller from the English Midlands", was (is) a real person, with a sense of privacy to feel protective over. Lines do get blurred, and an afterword by Joan Hawkins and a few online clicks will give you some sense of where the "truth" lies.

What remains so brilliant is the real, useful thought that Krauss builds out of her romantic fantasy

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Time does dilute sensation, though, and nearly two decades on, and with the appearance and success in the intervening years of other self-cannibalising writers such as Marie Calloway, Rachel Cusk and Karl O. Knausgaard, it's become easier to look beyond Kraus's bold – or violent – gesture of transgression.

What remains so brilliant about the book is the real, useful thought that Kraus builds out of her romantic fantasy. This starts, though doesn't end, with her consideration of love and desire, how "sex short-circuits all imaginative exchange". Chris and Sylvère separate; Chris and Dick do sleep together, but still he remains distant, callous, even as Chris is driven to lonely despair, spending a cold winter holed up in Upstate New York. She gets lost in the woods and nearly dies, and goes to the toilet in the yard because the pipes in her house have frozen: images such as these go a long way to balancing out the discussions of critical theory - Deleuze and Guattari and the like - that dominate later parts of the book.

Kraus keeps writing the letters to Dick, keeps trying to make it work, but becomes increasingly aware of how much she has at stake, as an artist and a writer, compared to a man in the same position. She thinks of other female artists whose forms of self-expression were dismissed as cranky or quirky while their objectivising male colleagues were lionised. The revelation comes that this is a structural problem: "The incident congealed into a philosophy: art supersedes what's personal. It's a philosophy that serves patriarchy well and I followed it more or less for 20 years. That is: until I met you."

You can call it a novel, then, but it's as a philosophical and cultural critique that I Love Dick bites hardest.

Tuskar Rock Press, £12.99. Order at the discounted price of £10.99 inc. p&p from the Independent Bookshop