Many readers of Chris Kraus’ previous fiction can perhaps recall when the author ponders, “It occurred to Catt Dunlop that the epistemological groundwork for the war in Iraq had been laid by Paris Hilton’s anal sex video.”[1] This is but one of many sly Krausisms, a wry hypothesis in her 2012 novel, the Summer of Hate. Kraus’ new novel, written under the teen-like title, The Four Spent the Day Together (2025), couldn’t be more Kraus-esque if she were to toy with similar theories when she writes, “Melania Trump’s old porn photos were hitting the internet while Catt drove to Balsam.”[2]
Cocooned in a sickly cloud of glossless, middle-and-low-class America, Chris Kraus amalgamates dumbness, poverty, success, disappointment and online “hate” culture into a full-fat fiction cocktail. The Four Spent the Day Together is a portrayal of some of America’s saddest small towns clouded by the West Coast’s cultural megalopolis, Los Angeles. Catt Greene is buffeted by cancel culture, her partner’s alcoholism, the real estate boom and gentrification, social media doom, the vapidness of the art world, and a murder investigation. The novel builds pressure until it shrieks. It unnerves the reader’s senses, striking blunt and dumb.
We are introduced to Kraus’ protagonist and the novel’s realm: between Walmart, “where everything happened,” suburbs, old dilapidated mining neighborhoods and vacant car parks, meth and alcohol addiction, DUIs, AAs, #MeToos, liquor stores and Chevrolet dealerships, online sexting, and dingy attic rooms. Published for the first time outside of the Semiotext(e) family umbrella, by Scribner (New York), Kraus’s fourth is a true-crime novel. And although the real crime only arrives fully in its third and final chapter, Harding, the novel’s overall premise alternates on several dramatically-staged strata: desire, love, unhappiness and addiction, all sickly and swarming as radioactive haze.
The novel is a three-part journey written chronologically: Milford, Balsam, and Harding. Milford chronicles Catt’s middle-class parents’ life. Catt’s background traces the author’s very own though it collages itself under the gauzy veil of fiction. Her father Jasper, who works in publishing, her mother Emma, who’s short, busty, and round like a ripe berry with the church for refuge, and her disabled sister Carla. Switching East Bronx for Connecticut’s idyllic suburbia, Catt’s mother soon starts feeling entrapped, alone and purposeless: “Milford has nothing to do with the city. It was strange and remote.”[3] Emma’s daily tedium continues as she drives Catt and Carla back and forth to school. She’s busy “baking a pound cake from scratch and inventing new ways to get three meals out of a chicken.”[4]
Trapped in a dull suburban shithole, teenage Catt opts to kill time getting high: “Alone in her room, Catt discovered she could get high by inhaling the office supplies her father brought home from Cambridge—bottles of Liquid Paper, tubes of rubber cement. No one knew she did this.”[5]
“Drugs were something people did to make sitting doing nothing in a room seem exciting.”[6] The stark confessional slant that Kraus writes Catt with inflames our judgment. Perhaps, it creates a valence of understanding. After all, many of us may sympathize with Catt that it seems easier to temporarily escape mundanity than face it.
Catt knows she has to get out of Milford, but she has no clue how. Not yet. Before her parents decide to leave for Wellington, New Zealand, Catt, like all teenagers before her, becomes an unleashed, sex-and-adventure-seeking hot mess. Kraus offers us the staccato of Catt’s surging recklessness; her body suggests things it desires. Her virginity, a tepid obstacle she needs to get rid of. With her only friend, Heather, they hitchhike down to Bushnell Park. They meet Damien and Jonathan. The four crawl into the neighbour’s house, smoke hash, fuck. Minutes after, the police break in. Catt’s grounded. The boys are imprisoned. From then on, nothing is the same.
One does not need to ponder twice that The Four Spent the Day Together reads as a follow-up to The Summer of Hate. Whether this was intentional or not, it helps the reader to position familiar characters and events into a new perspective. Parallel to her namesake in The Summer of Hate, Catt Dunlop, now Catt Greene, lives in Los Angeles, writes, and teaches part-time at a college. She’s together with Paul Garcia. They met in 2005. Catt dragged him out of the shitstorms he was marinating in till he met her. And although we were familiar with Paul’s alcoholic upheavals before, his character evolves and erodes across the storyline of the new novel. It begs a question whether their romantic relationship can survive his addiction; demons that haunt and allure him while Catt’s gone, giving lectures and promoting her writing. “The idea of drinking called out to him like a beautiful siren.”[7]
Years pass by. It’s 2012. Milford flips to Balsam, Minnesota. Catt works on an unfinished book, After Kathy Acker. Kraus renders what hunger for approval did to anyone online on the global scale: “Twenty eleven, 2012, 2013 were the years in LA when it seemed like everything escalated. Was it because everyone was online all the time? UberX, promoted by the Obama administration, was launched, driving medallioned taxi drivers out of business, into debt and suicide. No one talked about how the invisible mesh of surveillance and data control that surrounded the world was tightening. Time sped up, a continual stream of cascading events that meant less and moved faster.”[8]
And although she ponders on the aftermath of all things drifting online, Catt’s aware that it brought her some substantial benefit. “Still, at the same time, the migration of all the things online gave a big boost to Catt’s career as a writer. Things that she’d written more than a decade before were being discovered, posted and tweeted by a new generation of younger women.”[9]
What’s alluring about The Four Spent the Day Together is its sense of time compound. The narrator’s voice, as a proxy for Kraus’ own, recounts and layers the course of a life in a semi-fictive, semi-autobiographical style. Novels that Catt had written earlier resurface. Partners she had loved come and go. Places she had lived and left are brought back, then swallowed by time.
After all, nostalgia sells better than sex. Once sedimented, the past hovers along with the present. Because the novel form allows Kraus to deal with time in a large scale, she shows how history ripples through life.
The novel’s second part, Balsam, reads as an emotional transition from city to countryside. It is the heart of the novel, where Kraus renders her histories at their most personal. It narrates what Kraus recalls, in Catt’s words, as “swimming in time rather than drowning in it”[10]. She writes about proximity to nature, to Twin Lakes. The isolated wildlife of northern Minnesota reminds her of the old times, years she’s spent with Mikal, her former partner. One may or may not assume that Mikal is inspired by Kraus’s former partner, French literary critic Sylvère Lotringer.
At first, Catt’s wildly conflicted about her life within the Los Angeles art world. “Catt did not even like art, she’d always choose the botanical gardens over museums or galleries.”[11] Eventually, by writing about artists, she ends up respecting their work. She intends to buy a modest small compound cabin in Minnesota, overlooking South Jonas Lake. A place where she could write, and Paul set up his office—she projects. She harks back to memories of being poor and working the most menial jobs in New York. Up until forty, Catt had had no money to fix her crooked teeth.
LA becomes swarmed by the warm buzz of capital. It “pulsed through the streets like caffeine. All the old diners were closing and being replaced with high-concept cafés. Catt craved stability—she’d loved these old shabby neighbourhoods for what they had been and the people who lived in them, and hated the idea of becoming a part of this tsunami of gentrification.”[12]
Shortly after Catt and Mikal sign “their separation agreement on a napkin at a Jewish delicatessen,”[13] Catt receives a call from a real estate broker with a deal for the house in Balsam. Paul and her move there. But what follows is Paul’s on-and-off alcoholic relapses while he works at a psychiatric clinic. In between his multiple breakdowns and repents, Catt threatens divorcing him.
Kraus’ lucid prose balances the sardonic and the forlorn climate of cultural cachets in sleek details: “How much, she’d asked herself then, can one spend on a scented candle? The answer was $73.”[14]
“Twenty sixteen was the moment of the aging,”[15] Catt reconciles. She sells TV rights for her first book, I Love Dick. However, her widespread fame gets quickly stained. Here, Kraus grants us with contagious unease—a truculent feeling. Cancel culture that cements around Catt and her career as a writer. “Oh, Catt Greene? She’s a landlord, not a writer.”[16] She gets called out by protesters (a movement against LA’s gentrification & displacing people) at a reading event in New York promoting Acker’s biography. In its aftermath, she faces a tidal wave of accusations.
“Someone went into her Wikipedia page and changed her occupation from writer to landlord.”[17] The scornful online attacks from the comfort of one’s bedroom so rampant that they drive haters out of their minds. In Kraus’ words, we’re witnessing how it takes only minutes and a handful of clicks to cancel someone online.
It’s 2019 and before Catt flies back to LA, she comes across a newspaper article titled, The four spent the day together. The report announced that Micah, Evan and Brittney have been charged with the murder, kidnapping and robbery of victim Brandon Halbach. As if a temporary patch out of a grotesque nature of her “slumlord” online accusations and ongoing distrust of Paul’s binge-drinking, Catt soon becomes obsessed with finding out more about the murder case. After all, it happened near the trailer road where she and Paul frequently rode their bikes.
The four, “They must’ve been high—on what drugs? Were they friends? What did they talk about? She longs to investigate.”[18] Over the course of Harding, the homicide becomes a new narrative. A window toward an odd kind of instinct that pulls Catt closer to explore the nature of the murder. Something that she gives her full-time attention to, instead of fretting over Paul’s drinking and lies. Anything to give her a new meaning in a place where she’s always been the one who helped everyone. But is the murder solely content for a new book to write? Or does it summon up Catt’s teen nostalgia?
Troubled teenagers and the sinister acts they commit are nothing new on the spectrum of true crime entertainment. Historically, true-crime novels date as far back as 16th-century executions. They were refined by writers like Edmund Pearson in the early 20th century, and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1965). Since the 2010s, it has been turned into cinematic junk food and documentaries have been served to the masses of consumers. It both abhors and appeals to mainstream audiences because it mirrors human fascination with a sick, gory part of ourselves, the kind of violence we can commit.
At times, I was reminded of Rebecca Godfrey’s novel Under The Bridge (2005). Godfrey wrote about the true story of a fourteen-year-old girl who was murdered by her female friends. “Young girls from the Victoria were the ones we were supposed to protect, not to be protected from.”[19]
In her take on true crime, Kraus’ last chapter zooms into specifics and reveals a research of her narratives: an old mining city, its low-class residents and their meth-addicted kids. What Kraus does with the story is to harness a desolate feeling that prevails. It mirrors one of America’s deepest trappings: an arcane scenery of those labeled as poor and underprivileged, incarcerated and mostly at their worst. A deluge of systematic, sociological havoc erodes and deprives several generations. Daughters witness their mothers dealing drugs. The cycle repeats.
In The Four Spent the Day Together Kraus blends a true crime with an auto-fiction by inserting and weaving pains of her own life along with/next to the violence in small-town America. The intimate and the collective agony coerce, thus creating a meta format. Her confessional approach and predominance of personal histories could easily paint it as a generational novel. But would it be Kraus if she didn’t fuck around with categories and their tedium? Their binaries? In that sense, she does what she’s always done best: snarky surgical sentences that dazzle because they don’t anaesthetize the dread. They embrace it. They don’t shy away from dissecting the highest echelons of society to her own most personal memories.
Time passes and is pressed differently between the first and the last chapters of the novel. It dictates the rhythm of the story. While her plump sentences at the beginning are scented with Catt’s memories of the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers, the last chapter is built upon hollowed Facebook texting. Her writing asserts the wispy sentence structure, Police statements and elements that reflect cool, uncool Millennial language. Such a sharp contrast brings into relief how language and communication have deteriorated in the span of those years.
By the end of the novel, Catt’s research comes to an unsurprising dead end. She can’t find any clear motives behind the crime. She’s left with the 80-page criminal report of the murder, providing nothing more than information—specifically Facebook messages between the four. The murder tumbles into an unanswerable dread. Nothing beats more senseless than having no answer for a crime committed by three kids. It veers into a spasm. “The three of them did this for their own amusement, because they wanted to. They wanted to do something bad. They wanted to do something sinister. The cell phones are in storage now.”[20]
Unlike Kraus’ last three novels, The Four Spent the Day Together intensifies the torpidity and violence her protagonists reckon with. However, Kraus gives us something far more truculent and buoyant than just a ‘trad true crime novel’. What struck me was its conflicted stage. A multi-generational record that blends the personal and public atrocities. The one with less of an illusion, and more of a twenty-first-century malaise. The kind that collates domestic, the familial, the rural and the unpredictable. A junkyard with precious collectibles: Suburban sociology meets Kraus’ version of true crime meets art world sensibility. A nifty collector, Kraus assembles tchotchkes of twisted human nature.
The end of the novel seeps with a mysterious coldness and anger. A play of soulless amusement in the face of murder, the absolute ineffability of such acts. A cackle to mortality where not much, if anything, seems sacred any longer. It makes me think of a screenshot of an image so brutally real I can’t help but stare right at its blazing, burning center.
When I flipped the last page, I thought, Is this it? What happens with Catt and the murder case next? Where will she wander off now? A shabby cabin in the woods, or her Los Angeles apartment? Well, I imagine Kraus would perhaps say: “Don’t Snitch. Don’t Tell.”
Chris Kraus: The Four Spent the Day Together, Scribner, New York, 2025. 320 pp. $29.
[1] Chris Kraus, Summer of Hate, 2012, p. 27
[2] Chris Kraus, The Four Spent the Day Together, 2025, p.150
[3] Ibid., p. 6
[4] Ibid., p. 19
[5] Ibid., p. 56
[6] Ibid., p. 63
[7] Ibid., p. 180
[8] Ibid., p. 87
[9] Ibid., p. 89
[10] Ibid., p. 89
[11] Ibid., p. 122
[12] Ibid., p. 101
[13] Ibid., p. 106
[14] Ibid., p. 109
[15] Ibid., p. 141
[16] Ibid., p. 178
[17] Ibid., p. 180
[18] Ibid., p. 183
[19] tbd
[20] Ibid., p. 302
