THE FOUR SPENT THE DAY TOGETHER, by Chris Kraus
The novelist Chris Kraus doesn’t demand your attention but earns it. There’s a steady quality to her observations and her truth-dealing, one that makes you want to see more clearly and live more deliberately. Some writers make life seem like a game. Kraus, who is also a filmmaker and art critic, makes it seem like a project.
Her new novel, “The Four Spent the Day Together,” is not her best work, and it’s probably not the place to start with her. But if you’ve followed her, you’ll probably want to read it anyway, to catch the next episode, as it were, of her long semi-autobiographical project. It has its rewards.
Kraus’s best-known novel is the slow-burning indie phenomenon “I Love Dick” (1997). The title renders it awkward to read in a dentist’s lobby. It’s a frank, dazzling novel about a sexless marriage, a woman’s ambient sense of failure, art and philosophy, and the struggle for minimal financial equilibrium. It is largely told in bushels of letters written to an attractive and enigmatic intellectual named Dick. It has many ardent admirers, and it deserves them. It is sui generis.
She followed “I Love Dick” with three more semi-autobiographical novels. Each defies tidy summary. Virginia Woolf wrote that “the test of a book (to a writer) is if it makes a space in which, quite naturally, you can say what you want to say.” Kraus’s novels are elastic in this manner. Each is about everything from metaphysics to convenience stores to the art world to lust to Crohn’s disease. Each features a woman who resembles Kraus.
In “The Four Spent the Day Together,” the fifth novel in this loose series, the Kraus character is named Catherine, or Catt. We first meet her as a child in the 1950s and ’60s in suburban Milford, Conn., where her family is sinking instead of swimming. Catt is unpopular in school, and she wants out. She finds drugs, and she finds trouble.
We meet Catt again in the 2010s. She has become a famous writer, the author of a novel called “I Love Dick.” She’s confused by the attention. She senses that some of her readers want her to be something of a motivational speaker, which makes her feel “fraudulent and cheesy.” Her sense of herself is still under construction.
She has left the elegant man, a philosophy professor, she was married to in “I Love Dick,” and has fallen for a roguish ex-con named Paul. He’s an alcoholic who was imprisoned for defrauding his employer, Halliburton. They end up living in a small town in northern Minnesota’s Iron Range.
The last of this novel’s three sections reads like true crime. Catt, who feels she’s running out of autobiographical material for her work, digs into a local murder. Three teenagers have shot and killed an older acquaintance after, as a news article puts it, “the four spent the day together” — a line that Catt finds bewildering and beguiling. It’s an almost inexplicable crime.
At its best, this section reminded me of the 1986 movie “River’s Edge,” about teenagers and a similarly senseless murder, and of John Darnielle’s 2022 novel “Devil House,” about a true crime writer digging into an unsolved murder while questioning the ethics of his work. The problem with this section is that it dangles off the rest of Kraus’s novel like a poorly attached third arm.
“The Four Spent the Day Together,” as it percolates along, has many extra-fine moments. It contains one of the most sensitive and intricate portraits of alcoholism I’ve read in a long time — the joy and dread that accompanies slipping into old vices.
It has a lot to say about cancel culture. Catt faces censure, as Kraus once did, after writing about renovating some rental buildings she owned. Suddenly she’s “the foremost landlord of American letters.” The hysteria, the online gasoline and matches, baffles her.
The background noise is Donald J. Trump’s 2016 election and the swamping nature of social media:
It was completely addictive, everyone checking their privilege while flaunting it. It made no difference how transparently self-serving these posts were. People who’d once prided themselves on their distrust of authority dove like lemmings into social media, hungry for approval from their new online communities.
The novel is good on the pain of falling a few rungs on the class ladder. It’s a stark moment when Catt’s mother, Emma, must go to work in a truck stop as a waitress.
Kraus has an offbeat eye for food and its multiple meanings — for example, the broke, meth-addled teenagers with their Monster energy drinks and ramen and cans of SpaghettiOs purchased with E.B.T. cards. Until I read this novel I don’t think I’d ever heard anyone speak in favor of a China Buffet. Here we read:
Catt swore by the China Buffet as the only real chance to eat fast, healthy food on long road trips. As always she half-filled her plate with white rice and vegetables. Paul clocked her despair as he loaded his plate up with pork, fried rice and egg rolls. She wanted to talk, then — about anything. Paul, she’d whispered as he shoveled the poison into his mouth, can you slow down, please?
Kraus’s books are about the process of furnishing an inner life for oneself. Catt is older and wiser and a bit more secure in her own mind and body than Kraus’s previous stand-ins, in a manner that made me recall a line from “I Love Dick”: “Is there any greater freedom than not caring anymore what certain people in New York think of me?”
THE FOUR SPENT THE DAY TOGETHER | By Chris Kraus | Scribner | 304 pp. | $29
Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade.
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