If you know the name Chris Kraus, you probably also know that for a time, she was infatuated with a man named Dick.
Her 1997 debut novel, aptly titled “I Love Dick,” became a cult hit and the basis of an Amazon Prime TV series starring Kathryn Hahn. The book consists of letters Kraus and Sylvère Lotringer, her husband at the time, wrote to a rugged, reticent media scholar who had captured her erotic imagination. The correspondence evolves from outright expressions of desire to include her thoughts on Central American politics, historical erasure in the arts and schizophrenia.
When she wrote the book, Kraus was a stalled-out experimental filmmaker tired of being her husband’s intellectual plus-one. (Lotringer was a charismatic philosopher 17 years her senior.) Its resurgent popularity a decade ago transformed her into an icon for a generation of artists, drawn to her frankness about emotional abjection, failure and other taboos, and who have rallied around her as the face of a uniquely female brand of autofiction.
If this is where your knowledge of Kraus ended, “The Four Spent the Day Together,” her new novel — a blend of personal history, cultural commentary and true crime reportage — might seem a far cry from the desire-addled preoccupations she explored in the late ’90s.
This is the problem with autofiction: Even the most compelling, three-dimensional and lauded avatars can’t tell you the whole story.
The reality is that Kraus has been writing about class and the degradation of American institutions for years, hidden in plain sight among philosophical passages and episodes of B.D.S.M. The protagonist of her later fiction, including “The Four Spent the Day Together,” is named Catt, but otherwise closely resembles Kraus.
Hedi el Kholti, who edits the independent press Semiotexte with Kraus, said the autofiction label belies the real drive behind her writing. She uses material from her life to “arrive at a certain truth about a certain moment,” he said. “It’s not solipsistic.”
In person, Kraus, 70, doesn’t carry overt traces of her fictional stand-ins: not the jaded, trouble-seeking teenager, nor the gnomic writer who admires Simone Weil and describes having sex with an alien. In an interview over Uruguayan food in Brooklyn last month, she flitted easily between discussing the charms of a 5-year-old’s birthday party and the all-consuming depravity she encountered while reporting her new book.
“The decisions that I’ve made in my life have always been in the interest of giving myself freedom,” she said, sipping a white wine spritzer.
Her only real training, she said, was in acting, which she studied in her 20s in New York City. She was drawn to French philosophers, such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and developed a voracious reading appetite. This is partially what attracted her to Lotringer, who founded Semiotexte and helped give literary theory an underground sex appeal.
Kraus decided early on to support herself financially with real estate investments, rather than rely entirely on her writing or tenuous academic posts. She’s come under fire for owning apartments and other residences — “somebody made a decal on Etsy against me,” she recalled, incredulously — and her ventures have gotten her into some unenviable scrapes.
They’re also how she met her second husband, an important figure in her 2012 novel, “Summer of Hate,” as well as in “The Four Spent the Day Together”: She hired him to manage apartments in Albuquerque.
Having other sources of money has allowed her to write only about what interests her, and to champion underappreciated work. Kraus can be “mercenary in her generosity,” as the artist Juliana Halpert put it. “Though she writes with candor, she never aspires to tear anyone down.”
Except, possibly, herself. Here is Kraus in a letter from “I Love Dick”: “I wonder if there’ll ever be a possibility of reconciling youth and age, or the anorexic open wound I used to be with the money-hustling hag that I’ve become.”
She is used to being an anomaly, even among writers.
“She didn’t get tenure and start writing poems about the squirrels in her yard,” the novelist Colm Toibin said. “She’s always going from an unheard-of place to another unheard-of place, while others are on panels at the 92Y.”
“The Four Spent the Day Together” is, in a way, an anarchist’s idea of a completed novel: Its three sections follow distinct story lines decades apart, including Kraus’s childhood and the fallout of an unrelated drug-fueled murder, and arrive at a larger point about what she sees as a declining postindustrial American economy.
Linking elements of her midcentury upbringing in Connecticut with the lives of young adults in rural Minnesota, Kraus realized she was working on a large canvas: “This is the American working-class saga,” she said.
Kraus was born in the Bronx, then moved with her parents and younger sister to Connecticut when she was 5. It was a jolt: The family experienced a type of loneliness peculiar to the suburbs, and felt their relative poverty in comparison to those living in wealthier neighboring towns.
Her father worked in warehouses for publishing companies but longed to be an editor. He and Kraus bonded over literature, though she had a rebellious adolescence. When she was 15, the family left for New Zealand, where they had no ties.
For decades Kraus had wanted to write about her childhood, but knew she couldn’t broach the subject while her parents were alive. “It would have been too hurtful,” she said. “Everything in our family was based on this utterly false mythology.”
Invited to speak at Yale, Kraus’s hosts took her after the event “to this place that they considered really sleazy and kitsch,” she recalled.
It was where her mother had once worked as a waitress.
Kraus got a kick out of the irony, and told her father about it. He didn’t see the humor.
The first section of “The Four Spent the Day Together” covers this middle-class Connecticut history and picks up with Catt/Kraus decades later: At that point, she’s an established author and critic, and somewhat ambivalent about the success of “I Love Dick.” She and her second husband, a therapist grappling with alcohol addiction, shuttle between Los Angeles and Minnesota, where they also own a home.
In 2019, Kraus learned about what seemed to be a senseless murder. In Harding, Minn., a rural town about a half-hour away from where she lived, three teenagers killed an older acquaintance in an “assassination-style shooting.” The motive wasn’t immediately clear, and a phrase from local news coverage — “the four spent the day together” — haunted her imagination.
A year after the crime, Kraus drove down for a research trip.
“Walking around in the late afternoon with my notebook, in the neighborhood where the crimes happened,” she said, “I had an incredibly powerful déjà vu of my own childhood and the yards where I used to play kickball after school, of people’s porches and clotheslines.”
Kraus got her start as a journalist, and the impulse never left her. The Harding murder called to her as a way out of her own professional ennui, and she felt a deep connection to the teenagers accused of the crime, their families and their circumstances.
“Chris has a heightened sensitivity to the world, almost like a human smoke alarm,” said Halpert, who also studied with Kraus at ArtCenter College in Pasadena, Calif. “She feels everything very intensely, especially other people’s predicaments. There’s not much of a barrier between her and her world.”
Meth and opioid addiction is a major problem in and around Harding, and Kraus bonded with many locals over her experience as the wife of an addict. (She turned to some unorthodox methods: Early on, Kraus plastered the local laundromat and Walmart with posters offering $50 to anyone who’d speak to her about using meth. Only one person responded, and she was a no-show.)
“I was really feeling while I was working on it that there was so little depiction of the people who live alongside the addiction,” Kraus said. “It’s so isolating and shameful. It really is a kind of poison that seeps from the addict to everyone in their orbit.”
Fortunately, writing about shame is one of her hallmarks.
“What Chris manages to do with that is find a prose style that’s calm and almost ordinary to describe the things that we would otherwise keep secret,” said Toibin. “Using a high literary vision to directly explore addiction wouldn’t satisfy her,” he continued — not when the stakes are the “extraordinarily bad business of secrecy, power and control that involves living with an alcoholic.”
Each of her books, starting with “I Love Dick,” has taken Kraus, and her readers, to previously unexplored territory. Friends see the new novel as a chance to appeal to audiences who might not ordinarily reach for her brand of experimental fiction.
When she writes, Kraus keeps in mind “the contradiction between the ideal and the real,” she said. That’s always funny, “because that’s where the failure is.”
Zeroing in on the moments of embarrassment, she added, is a way to quickly reach someone: “It’s the most universal and human experience.”
Joumana Khatib is an editor at The Times Book Review.
The post She’s Still Writing About Herself. Plus Meth, Murder and Minnesota. appeared first on New York Times.
