An unforgettable new novel from the author of the modern classic I Love Dick - a witty, probing journey into a fractured America, culminating in the investigation of a teenage murder.
On the Iron Range of northern Minnesota, at the end of the last decade, three teenagers shot and killed an older acquaintance after spending the day with him. In a cold, rundown town, the three young people were quickly arrested and imprisoned. No one knows why they did it.
At the time of the murder, Catt Greene and her husband, Paul Garcia, are living nearby in a house they'd bought years earlier as a summer escape from Los Angeles. Undergoing a period of personal turmoil, moving between LA and Minnesota - between the urban art world and the rural poverty of the icy Iron Range - Catt turns away from her own life and towards the murder case, which soon becomes an obsession. In her attempt to pierce through the mystery surrounding the murder and to understand the teenagers' lives, Catt also finds herself travelling back through the idiosyncratic, aspirational lives of her parents in the working-class Bronx and small-town, blue-collar Milford, Connecticut.
Written in three linked parts, The Four Spent the Day Together explores the histories of three generations of American lives and the patterns that repeat over lifetimes, and is piercing commentary on the pressures of lives lived on the edge.
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'This is a novel of the American moment by a writer whose antennae are attuned to subtle connections and strange cross-currents. Chris Kraus has a gift for making intimate things part of a pattern and for making that pattern a fresh and engaged way of dramatising the way we live now.' -- Colm Toibin, author of <i>Long Island</i> 'It's really, really good. Maybe the best thing she's written.' -- Gary Indiana, author of <em>Rent Boy</em> 'Unlike so many books one reads, this book is like a real book. Chris Kraus is one of America's best - purest, least corporate, most bracingly weird - writers. She's an artist of the margins: of crime and addiction and fallenness, of the indignity of poverty and the injustices of class. She's serious but never, ever a drag: funny and ironic, a gentle spirit who knows, when need be, how to wield a knife. American literature would be healthier - more vital, more fun - if more people read Chris Kraus.' -- Benjamin Moser, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of <em>Sontag: her life and work</em> 'The Four Spent the Day Together is the great American novel we need right now to understand what has happened to America. To understand how we got here. This is the book for our time, just as perhaps American Psycho was the book of the 80s and 90s. It shows how it happened, how everything is linked, how the American dream slowly drifted into the American nightmare - at its core, within the American middle class. This is Chris Kraus's masterpiece. It is the proof, if needed, that she is more than a transgressive, avant-garde, iconic writer - she is just one of the greatest American writers, one who is able to tell us what's wrong with the world and transform our stupor into thinking.' -- Constance Debre, author of <em>Name</em> 'What a truly unique, brilliant, surprising, and bold book this is. It is not at all what I expected. I went in thinking of my favourite true crime classics. And it is true that Kraus matches the elegance of Capote's In Cold Blood and his refusal of narrative or moral simplicity. She similarly paints a rich, honest picture of social class in America, and the ways in which class and circumstance constrain a life. Yet Kraus also scales nimbly over time to thread together parallel stories of lives quietly falling apart. She affords these so much complexity and grace. One minute we are in the 60s in the Bronx with a lonely young mother, constrained by her financial circumstances and the demands of her children. The next an alcoholic continually relapses, sending his life into disarray. Meanwhile an old marriage ends in divorce and so a decades long best friendship slowly fades. Each story feels frank, humane and revelatory. Each life is detailed with so much compassion. I really loved the honesty of this book. I couldn't stop reading it and I will recommend it to everyone.' -- Rachel Connolly, author of <i>Lazy City</i> 'The Four Spent the Day Together is searing politics by storytelling, a novel constructed through counterpoint as it moves among the drowned, the drowning, and the survivors of the brutal American landscape we live in now.' -- Siri Hustvedt, author of <What I Loved</i> 'Excellent retelling of an American nightmare with its unique Chris Kraus prose: sharp, bold, fast paced, and piercingly direct. The Four Spent The Day Together will be a great read for anyone who is passionate about understanding the complexity of marginal lives and the danger of living on the edge.' -- Xiaolu Guo, author of <em>Call Me Ishmaelle</em> and <em>Radical</em> 'This is an entirely new kind of novel, one that shows how helplessly connected we are to our time and to each other. It's rich, heartbreaking, and powerful.' -- Eileen Myles 'This is the best Chris Kraus book to date, both more literary and way crazier than her previous classics. I loved it!' -- Stewart Home, author of <i>69 Things to do with a Dead Princess</i> 'Unflinchingly honest, The Four Spent the Day Together is a spry exploration of self and society. From the book's beginnings in Milford, Connecticut, to its looming conclusion in Harding, Minnesota, Kraus evokes an America which is both expansive and exacting. Kraus is not only a master of auto-fiction, but a thorough and thoughtful reporter.' -- Catherine Airey, author of <i>Confessions</i> 'I always so admire the work of Chris Kraus for the astringent truths contained there. The Four Spent the Day Together is no exception. What a sharp, smart, unsettling, memorable work it is.' -- Rick Moody, author of <em>The Long Accomplishment</em> 'The latest work of autofiction by an iconic Los Angeles writer ... Kraus' relentless curiosity is a gravitational force.' * Kirkus Reviews * 'An episodic journey ... It is an attempt to make sense of chaos. Kraus bears witness to a nation reckoning with its undoing ... Though Kraus distances herself from the term "autofiction", this novel sits comfortably alongside works by Maggie Nelson, Sheila Heti and Olivia Laing, abandoning conventional plot and blurring the lines between fact and fiction.' -- Justine Hyde * The Saturday Paper * Praise for Chris Kraus:
'The intelligence and honesty and total originality of Chris Kraus make her work not just great but indispensable ... I read everything Chris Kraus writes; she softens despair with her brightness, and with incredible humour, too.' -- Rachel Kushner, author of <i>Creation Lake</i> Praise for Chris Kraus:
'A powerfully original writer.' -- Dwight Garner * The New York Times * Praise for I Love Dick:
'Chris Kraus's I Love Dick offers the story of a woman named Chris Kraus - also an experimental filmmaker, just like the author - reckoning with her unrequited love for "Dick ____", a cultural critic with whom she becomes obsessed. The narrative is an exploration of desire as something other than passivity or inadequacy and relentless romantic pursuit not as self-degradation but a kind of generative, creative act.' * The New York Times * Praise for I Love Dick:
'The most important book about men and women written in the last century.' * The Guardian * Praise for I Love Dick:
'A clever, finely crafted crossover between life, love, and cultural studies.' * The Australian * Praise for I Love Dick:
'Tart, brazen, and funny ... a cautionary tale, I Love Dick raises disturbing but compelling questions about female social behaviour, power, control.' * The Nation * Praise for I Love Dick:
'Devastatingly funny and sublime ... a new classic.' * The Seattle Stranger * Praise for I Love Dick:
'A little masterpiece of late twentieth century literature.' * East Hampton Star * Praise for I Love Dick:
'Ever since I read I Love Dick, I have revered it as one of the most explosive, revealing, lacerating, and unusual memoirs ever committed to the page ... I Love Dick is never a comfortable read, and it is by turns exasperating, horrifying, and lurid, but it is never less than genuine, and often completely illuminating about the life of the mind.' * Post Road *
Chris Kraus is a writer and critic. Her novels include Aliens & Anorexia, I Love Dick, Torpor, and Summer of Hate. I Love Dick was adapted for television and her literary biography After Kathy Acker was published by Semiotext(e) and Penguin Press. Her work has been praised for its damning intelligence, vulnerability, and dazzling speed and has been translated into seventeen languages. She lives in Los Angeles.
