The Fine Art of Fucking Up

by Cate Dicharry

Overview

It’s war at the School of Visual Arts, and nobody’s art is safe. Not even Jackson Pollock’s!

Your archenemy taunts you with clandestine bacon frying. Your boss feverishly cyberstalks an aging romance novel cover model. Your husband unexpectedly takes in a wayward foreign national. Your best friend reveals a secret relationship with your longstanding workplace crush.

Welcome to the life of Nina Lanning, lone and floundering administrator of a prestigious Midwestern art school. Her colleagues are pioneers of contemporary art movements, inspirational orators, creative virtuosos and the source of constant headaches as they rage against the authority Nina represents. They also happen to be her closest friends.

When once-a-century flooding threatens to destroy the art building, and the priceless Jackson Pollock trapped inside, Nina and her ragtag band of faculty members undertake to rescue the early work of the splatter master. Propelled by disasters both natural and personal, Nina must confront her colleagues, her husband, and most importantly, herself. Cate Dicharry’s debut novel is a painfully hysterical examination of what is truly worth saving, and mastering the art of letting go.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781939419255
Publisher:	The Unnamed Press
Publication date:	04/14/2015
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Cate Dicharry lives in Iowa City, Iowa, with her husband and two small sons. The Fine Art of Fucking Up is her first novel.

Editorial Reviews

"Funny and charmingly ridiculous." —Kirkus Reviews

"Cate Dicharry’s comic timing is unimpeachable and though her characters are idiosyncratic and quirky, they are deeply dimensional and exceptionally real. A richly complicated and rewarding novel."
— Jill Alexander Essbaum, author of Hausfrau

"The title of this book will not lead you astray: fucking up happens here, in spectacular, delightfully, absurdly over-the-top fashion. Cate Dicharry's debut is a smart and tremendously fun read, and I rooted for Dicharry's Nina Lanning and her colleagues to pull off their crazy escapade all the way."
—Elizabeth Crane, author of We Only Know So Much

"In The Fine Art of Fucking Up, Cate Dicharry ups the ante on the campus novel, delivering a hilarious and often bloody tale of administrative derring-do. This is a sharp, big-hearted debut by a writer with talent to burn." —Jim Gavin, author of Middle Men

"Cate Dicharry has an unwaveringly merciless eye for the bogus aspects of art school. But you don't need a BA in Painting or Performance Studies to enjoy the screwball comedy of The Fine Art of Fucking Up. An affectionate yet unsparing view of how easy it is to lose one's way."
— Sara Levine, author of Treasure Island!!!

"Dicharry’s novel is a dark and funny mix of slapstick, observational humor and institutional satire. Ultimately, this is a caper, and Dicharry’s ability to write humor into tragedy, into her main character’s unspooling, makes for an entertaining read." —Electric Literature

"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." —Bookforum

"Cate Dicharry’s excellent debut novel, The Fine Art of Fucking Up, weaves humor and humanity to explore one woman’s personal and professional dissatisfaction and to suggest how we all might be able to cleave past our setbacks to find our own joy." —The Rumpus

"How thoroughly The Fine Art of Fucking Up sucked me in, and how, like good books tend to do, this novel operated by some kind of clairvoyant book magic: This is exactly the book you need to read right now; this is your life, but enough not your life to see it clearly. Good job. Keep reading." — Kailyn McCord in Quaint Magazine

From the Publisher

2015-01-21
In a debut novel that wallows in the angst of being 30-something and unsatisfied with life, Dicharry pulls the reader into the strange and frequently absurd world of art school while exploring the even stranger workings of personal happiness. Nina Lanning is the administrative coordinator at the distinguished School for Visual Art, which, despite its prestige, extraordinary building and the fact that it has a Jackson Pollock painting hanging in its atrium, seems to be the home base for a collection of increasingly dysfunctional eccentrics. Nina's boss, Ramona, the once exceptionally competent director of the SVA, falls into a cyberstalking-fueled obsession with a former romance-novel cover model and neglects her directorial duties. Nina finds herself overworked and placating a faculty that is either scheming, falling to pieces or involved in bizarre acts of revenge that include the clandestine frying of bacon in secret locations around the building. At the same time, Nina's marriage to her handsome, "incessantly optimistic" husband strains under her stress and a growing sense of inexplicable discontent. When a catastrophic flood threatens the SVA, Nina forces herself into a mission to rescue the Pollock painting, which also makes her re-examine everything she assumes about happiness. Told in Nina's voice, the novel suffers from an excess of mundane description and a strange lack of reflection, though its portrait of the academic art world is enjoyably cutting. As Nina says, "there's no real consequence to the antics of institutional art, even when mean spirited. It is, literally and otherwise, all academic." While the trials of art school reflect perhaps too obviously Nina's emotional malaise, they are both funny and charmingly ridiculous. A novel that offers a colorful and amusing portrayal of an art school's strange quirks but trudges through the unexceptional realization that happiness is rarely straightforward.

Kirkus Review