Luke Goebel’s “Kill Dick” Takes Aim at the Art World’s Sackler Shadow
A new novel is arriving with a provocation baked into its packaging. Luke Goebel’s “Kill Dick” announces its intentions before the first chapter: the back-cover blurbs are attributed to Anna Delvey and to novelist Ottessa Moshfegh, Goebel’s wife, who praises the book with a line pitched at maximal extremity: “If this book were any better, I’d cut my own head off.”
Inside, “Kill Dick” turns its attention to the art world’s uneasy proximity to the Sackler family, the philanthropic dynasty whose name became inseparable from the opioid crisis. Goebel fictionalizes that entanglement through the figure of Dick Sickler, a patriarchal antagonist described in the book’s own language as both “genocidal maniacs” and “art snobs” — a portrait that frames cultural patronage as a kind of moral laundering rather than civic generosity.
The novel’s scaffolding is deliberately loud. It opens with three epigraphs from “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” and its title reads like a darkly comic counterpoint to Chris Kraus’s art-world touchstone “I Love Dick.” From there, Goebel leans into a style that mimics the cadence of internet-era cultural writing: fast, abrasive, and engineered to keep the reader off balance.
That voice belongs to Susie, the book’s protagonist, whose numbness is both psychological and chemical. Addicted to Oxy, she narrates in blunt, sometimes deliberately crude sentences that treat shock as a baseline register. The prose toggles between first and third person, a formal device that tracks dissociation and self-consciousness: confession can feel “cringe,” the book suggests, so the narration slips away from intimacy just as it approaches it.
Goebel situates Susie’s private collapse inside a broader American atmosphere of constant emergency. The story is set in 2016, with an “Orange Candidate” running against a woman — a thin veil that keeps the political reference legible while maintaining the novel’s satirical distance. In Susie’s view, outrage has become so continuous that it loses force. “There was so much that needed protesting in America,” she thinks, “that people had gone numb, and posting online was about as effective as talking to yourself in the shower.”
Susie’s own rebellion is shaped by proximity to power. Her father is Dick Sickler’s lawyer, and his contempt for the dead is presented as a kind of inherited ideology: he dismisses more than half a million opioid deaths as “useless drug addicts… losers who would have merely found something else to kill them.” Susie, a vegan who insists she would “never hurt a living creature,” directs her violence elsewhere — toward her father, emotionally, and toward herself, chemically.
The art world appears not as a glamorous backdrop but as a social system with its own codes and shibboleths. The book drops fashion labels and the names of young Los Angeles artists — Jill Mulleady, Tala Madani — as if to test the reader’s fluency. It also skewers the aspirational grind of New York: Susie rejects the idea of clawing for status, imagining the absurdity of stressing over “an internship at PS1.”
Her drift takes her from NYU to Los Angeles alongside Phil Krolik, a professor with his own disillusionment. They take pills together; she drops out. He grows tired of teaching Marxism and climate catastrophe to wealthy students staring at their phones, wanting action rather than rhetoric. In LA, Susie’s days flatten into poolside intoxication and grief, including the aftermath of a roommate’s overdose — a scene rendered with the book’s characteristic insistence on the grotesque.
“Kill Dick” is, at its core, a satire of complicity: how money moves through culture, how institutions absorb tainted philanthropy, and how individuals anesthetize themselves when the moral math becomes unbearable. By filtering those questions through a narrator who is chemically and emotionally blunted, Goebel makes numbness itself the novel’s subject — not just a symptom of addiction, but a social condition that the art world, politics, and wealth all help to produce.
Whether readers find the book’s relentless edginess clarifying or exhausting, its target is unmistakable: the gap between cultural prestige and ethical consequence, and the ways that gap is maintained — by language, by taste, and by the stories people tell themselves to keep going.
