The Four Spent the Day Together by Chris Kraus
Expansive, self-reflective look at contemporary America from I Love Dick author
The Four Spent the Day Together, the new novel from I Love Dick author Chris Kraus, takes its name from a news report on a Minnesota murder case. However, expect something more expansive and personal than its crime-styled title implies. Protagonist Catt Greene is a writer whose life closely mirrors Kraus’s own to the extent that Greene is Kraus in everything but name. When we meet her, it is as the precocious daughter of Emma and Jasper Greene, a working-class couple whose fortunes fluctuate with post-war America’s changing face in the latter half of the 20th century.
Catt’s life is told through three distinct parts: first her parents’ early years in the Bronx of the 1940-60s where Catt is born before the family moves to Milford, Connecticut; their move to Balsam, North Carolina, where teen Catt comes of age in a storm of truancy and substance abuse, eventually blossoming into a successful writer with a well-meaning but ill-fated sideline in affordable housing; and finally Catt’s late-career years enthralled by a murder near her North Minnesotan summer cabin, her research a welcome distraction from COVID-19, her failed marriage to alcoholic partner Paul, and her tumultuous life in LA where accusations of slumlordism mire the release of her bestseller’s upcoming TV adaptation. Spanning 70-plus years, The Four Spent the Day Together is Kraus’s self-reflective, densely packed portrait of contemporary American life.