Fall Books: On Chris Kraus’s The Four Spent the Day Together

Chris Kraus, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Chris Kraus is the author of a book called I Love Dick. Chris Kraus is also the author of The Four Spent the Day Together, a new novel in which the main character, Catt Greene, is the author of a book called I Love Dick. Catt jokes that I Love Dick is “the one with the cover everyone posed with and tweeted.” Catt suspects at least a few of the people who pose with her book haven’t actually read it, but they like what owning the book implies: that they, too, love dick. It makes no difference that the novel is not exactly about loving dick, but about loving Dick, a particular man, not a sex organ.

Kraus is interested in words that mislead, in facts that point in various directions (the aliens in Aliens of Anorexia aren’t extraterrestrial but inside of us, and there is a great deal of energy in Torpor). Based on title alone, Kraus’s latest novel might suggest an image of four friends enjoying a luncheon on the grass followed by a charming trip to Brighton Beach. But in fact the novel is a fast-paced mystery told in three interconnected parts that culminate in a subtle reflection on class, power, and the banality of our brute instincts.

Catt, the novel’s heroine, starts out as a hitchhiker and drug dabbler who, in the novel’s second act, buys a cottage in Minnesota’s bleak, meth-plagued Iron Range. By the third act, she’s obsessed with a stunning, senseless murder that took place nearby: three working-class teenagers kidnapped an acquaintance, hung out with him for a few hours, and then killed him.

The randomness of the act confounds Catt. She struggles to understand the teenagers’ motives, their lives prior. “What were Brittney and Misty, Micah, Brandon, and Evan really like? What were their jokes, who were their other friends? Whom did they envy, what were their dreams?” Kraus writes.

Catt interviews the locals. She reads through the teenagers’ texts (lots of “wyd” and “Where you at”). Still, she can “find no answers.” She is locked out of their innermost consciousnesses, left to put their internal worlds together based on the bits of information provided to her. The lack of causality haunts her, the unconvincing inferences she is forced to make frustrate her. The frustration echoes the reader’s experience of Catt herself—throughout the novel, we are provided only with the facts of Catt’s life and are left to infer the intensity of the emotions that correspond to them. The reader must usher in a lo her reactions towards her alcoholic husband; toward her developmentally impaired little sister; towards the myopic wrath of her Twitter (and real-life) detractors. The most dramatic Catt gets is in her description of herself as “shaking and super-alert” in response to Paul’s drunken anger. But even this intensity is quickly smothered by logistical information: “She was catching the plane up to Oakland early the next morning. In eight more days she’d start the long drive up to Balsam, where, god willing, she’d finish the Acker biography by the first week of September. And she had to finish it then because once the pilot dropped in late August she’d be too busy to work.”

While in many ways this is a novel about aspirations, class, and addiction, it is most of all a novel that considers the opacity of human nature. We are composed of plans and facts: accumulated data that, on paper, have an aching lack of causality. A dossier on each of us exists somewhere. And it can say everything about you, yet reveal nothing. Or it can simply mislead. Like a photo of you with a book you’ve never read.

 

Sophie Madeline Dess is a writer. Her story “Zalmanovs” appeared in the Winter 2022 issue of The Paris Review.