The Fine Art of Fucking Up

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.

Iam sitting behind my desk watching the downpour when I catch the scent of bacon,” begins
Cate Dicharry’s The Fine Art of Fucking Up from Unnamed Press, “Dunbar is in the building
again, despite the restraining order.” Thus we are introduced to a quirky, kooky cast of
educators, the odd pairing of artists with academia. 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.
Full disclosure: Dicharry and I were both students at the UCR Palm Desert MFA

several years apart. We have many mutual friends, but do not know each

other well.

The Fine Art begins with its main character, Nina Lanning, administrative

coordinator of the School of Visual Arts, in crisis. Her boss, Ramona, who should

be running the school, has lost herself in a fantasy world of romance novel

obsession — so much so that she ignores all human interaction. The professors of

her school, each a talented and self-obsessed artist, only come running to her

when it serves their personal needs. One of the professors, Don Dunbar, has been

sneaking back into the building in violation of his restraining order, frying up

bacon in protest. At home, Nina’s husband, Ethan, decides he wants a baby, now.

As a “test”, he brings home an international student that they can care for and

use for practice. He tells Nina:

“He showed up in class this afternoon, distraught, I mean literally in

tears. He’s just figured out they’re closing his dorm for the summer. He

hadn’t been able to understand the email notifications or fliers. He had

no idea. Nobody told him. Can you believe that? Nobody checked that

he had made arrangements. He can’t go home because his visa is for

one entry per year, so if he leaves he won’t be able to get back in time

for the fall semester. He has nowhere to go.”

Nina doesn’t want a baby and she certainly doesn’t want an undergrad. That’s

only the beginning. One of the joys of Dicharry’s tale is how many crises are

happening at once. All of them, dire. Nina Lanning is juggling one bad thing after
another, and seeing her drop the ball is funny. Dicharry understands timing and

writes with wit.

Nina’s biggest problem — more than squabbling professors and procreating

husbands — is an impending flood, poised to fill the architectural wonder of an

arts building with sludge from the river, destroying the archives and a priceless

Jackson Pollock painting. With Ramona indisposed, it’s up to Nina to coordinate

the evacuation.

It occurs to me this will not be possible. We will be unable to evacuate

everything in time for the river cresting. Things will be lost. Equipment.

Furniture. Art. We’ll have to prioritize, decide what to save and what to

sacrifice, designations over which there will no doubt be disagreement.

Panic sets in, and I feel my chest constrict.

The scrutiny on Nina makes for great comedy, and Dicharry knows when to

release the pressure valve for laughs. What makes this more than a light romp,

though, is the way Dicharry underscores her main character’s frustrations with

real dilemmas. Her marriage — which seems happy and genial from the outside — 

is in crisis precisely because she and her husband are not talking about it. Her
reluctance to have a baby is rooted in an earlier decision to have an abortion.

She wonders about what happened to her identity as an artist after becoming an

administrator. Dicharry defines Nina’s rich inner life, and thus gives weight to

her struggles rather than using them for cheap laughs.

But laughs are plenty and often priceless. Dicharry writes Nina with keen

awareness about just how funny this tragedy is, even as it’s happening. During a

spirited break-in to save the Pollock painting, she falls out of a canoe and into the

rising floodwaters.

Never could I have imagined such circumstance: the building

underwater, Ramona trapped inside, the Pollock in peril, Suzanne and

James in love in a kayak, Ethan at home playacting fatherhood with an

international exchange student, and me, wanted by campus police

staggering around in sewage, a chipmunk carcass thumping against my

breastbone as I try to keep myself from throwing up.

“I note, with all possible connotation and entirely of my own doing,” Nina tells

us, “that I am immersed to the chin in shit.” In fact, Nina gets into so much of it

that readers will revel in trying to figure out how she gets herself out. When it

seems that no more terrible things can happen, Dicharry pushes harder.

The Fine Art of Fucking Up is a remarkable debut novel.

Praise for The Fine Art of Fucking Up

“Funny and charmingly ridiculous.”

“The juxtaposition of comedy and insight make The Fine Art of Fucking Up a delightful read.
Dicharry does a masterful job of using humor to reflect on Nina’s humanity even as that
humanity makes Nina’s predicament even more absurd. The novel succeeds both in being a
fun, lighthearted exploration of how things can go awry and a more thoughtful look at what
we must discard to get past our own troubles as well as the role art can and can’t play in that
transformation.”
—Anna March, The Rumpus

“[A] remarkable debut novel… a dark and funny mix of slapstick, observational humor and
institutional satire.”
—Heather Scott Partington, Electric Literature

“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…Call it beach reading for the library carrel…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.”
—Melissa Holbrook Pierson, Bookforum

“Cate Dicharry’s exemplary debut novel The Fine Art of Fucking Up is the literary version of
what you’d get if, say, Remedios Varo had painted ‘Dogs Playing Poker’, or Man Ray was
responsible for Glamour Shots Photography: an honest artspace where both absurdity and
ubiquity live together like the proper mates they actually are. Where the eccentricities of an
artist do not exempt him from humdrum human woe: petty jealousies, university politics, the
complexities of marriage, the annoyance of houseguests. Rain falls on the painter and the
painting alike. 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

“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!!!

“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, Quaint Magazine

“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 Middlemen