Imagine a slim and compelling true-crime novel. Now imagine that this novel has been added on to several hundred pages of the writer’s thoughts and feelings in the period before it occurred to her to write the true-crime novel. You have a pretty good picture of Chris Kraus’s The Four Spent the Day Together.
This structure works better than it sounds like it would, but even then it doesn’t work perfectly. In the crime novel part, Kraus’s alter ego Catt Greene investigates a meth-fuelled murder in Harding, a depressed town in Minnesota’s Iron Range, not far from the lake where Catt has recently bought her dream cabin. The three young killers spent the day with their older victim. But we hear nothing of either the crime or the killers until late in the book. Instead, we find ourselves in the vein Kraus has frequently mined since the publication, two decades ago, of I Love Dick, her celebrated 1997 autofictional account of sexual obsession: the unsparing description of her own life.
We follow Catt through the aimless and anxious days as she struggles to find a project. She frets over a Twitter feud that closely replicates one in which Kraus was involved. Catt permits her partner, Paul, a recovered but relapsing alcoholic, to mistreat her. She manages, or fails to manage, the apartments she owns in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the same ones Kraus wrote about in Summer of Hate, the 2012 novel in which characters named Catt and Paul also appear. In the first section, we get deep into Catt’s childhood in Milford, Connecticut, where Kraus also grew up. We’re told that Catt was thinking about writing a book on this era of her life, but then thought better of it; the first section of The Four Spent the Day Together may represent this abandoned book.
Is The Four an autofiction in which the main character writes a crime novel? Or is it a crime novel with an unusually lengthy preamble? Some readers will see a rabbit; others will see a duck. Let’s consider the two animals separately. Kraus’s virtues as a writer are most on display in the crime narrative, where, by asking around and reading court files on the sly, Catt tries to understand the murder. The three – two young men and a teenage woman – murdered a man they barely knew in retaliation for, according to the newspaper article Kraus includes, “allegedly pursuing” and perhaps sexually assaulting one of them, Brittney Moran. Kraus manages to be at once unsparing of her readers’ feelings, and merciful towards her subjects. She humanises the killers, not by searching strenuously for redeeming qualities, but by giving even-handed attention to their bleak lives, in which drugs, eviction, foster care, prison and violence have all played parts.
The killers call to mind Sartre’s dictum: they are “half victim, half accomplice, like everyone”. In the crime novel section, Kraus writes as someone who has fully grasped this fact about human beings and is no longer even surprised by it. In the autofictional preamble, though, her grip falters. Catt becomes the focus of online ire for owning apartments: “Catt Greene is a landlord, not a poet,” is the rallying cry. The same words were tweeted about Kraus, and evidently they still smart.
When it comes to her life in property, Kraus does not attain either the divine insouciance she has often achieved with respect to sex and sexual exploitation nor the balanced, God’s-eye view she takes here with respect to murder. The crime of property seems to make Catt more uneasy than the crime of taking a life, if only because it’s the former of which she stands accused. Every mention of Catt’s rentals bristles with mitigation: she rents to felons, she employs property managers down on their luck, and she herself is probably being swindled in her turn by the managers and the ex-cons. Surely she’s better than a property conglomerate?
Kraus employs a shifting third-person perspective in The Four; when she defends the apartments, she seems to be giving voice to Catt’s views. So Catt’s self-defences are not necessarily Kraus’s. But the question isn’t where Kraus, as a moral actor, stands; it’s what Kraus, as a writer, has gained or sacrificed. One of the pleasures of her writing at its best is that it offers the spectacle of a woman refusing to apologise for herself. There are glimmers of the unapologetic Kraus in this book. When Catt is a teenager, she and her rich friend break into an absent neighbour’s house in order to give two vagabonds they’ve just met a place to stay. The friend is supposed to be house-sitting for the neighbour, but she doesn’t have the key on her. They jimmy a window. The men have only just started in on what may or may not develop into sexual exploitation when the cops arrive and arrest the men, but not the girls, on suspicion of burglary and statutory rape. The scene ends with the men in handcuffs and the girls calling out their impotent apologies; all are held somehow equally in Kraus’s eerily impassive gaze. To watch Catt mentally rehearse replies to her online attackers is, by contrast, a dismal experience. In Kraus’s hands, the murky domain of sexual exploitation possesses both squalor and magnificence. Yet when the topic is property ownership, all that’s left is the squalor.
The question remains as to what the parts of The Four are doing in the same book. Why link the crime novel with its author’s present-day struggles and Milford childhood? If Kraus gives a lavish amount of space to the question of how Catt came to be the narrator of the three killers’ lives, that may be because the work of situating oneself is especially hard right now. We are inundated with news of catastrophes to which we have no direct connection, and on which it would be difficult, if not impossible, for us to act. Kraus and her subjects in the Iron Range murder do share a world, and, temporarily, a geographic region, but this world they share is skeletal, with all the connective tissue of civil society rotting away.
So what does connect them? Well, the killers are on their phones, and Catt is on her phone. Paul, her partner, is placed on probation; the killers are in and out of the foster system. Catt lived on the edge of exploitation as a teenager, acting, her mother thought, as if she were “trying to get raped”. Brittney Moran pushes analogous limits with catastrophic results – only she logs on to an app to do it. Catt’s apartments are going to ruin; the landlord of one of the teenagers complains that his mother trashed the place she rented from him. Kraus is trying to make the connection. And if a lengthy, looping backstory is required to do it, that isn’t altogether her fault. Such are the times we live in, Kraus might argue.
Fair enough, I suppose. But when autofiction apes the formlessness of the living conditions it wants to describe, it can be hard to tell whether this mimicry actually helps us see more clearly. The book is disjointed, you say? Like our lives! Aimless? Yes, isn’t that precisely our plight in late capitalism! Mimesis does not excuse everything. Form ought, at some point, to answer for itself. But if the first two sections could have been shorter, there is, nevertheless, an honesty about the elaborate lead-in. Kraus uses it to authorise herself as a chronicler not just of her own life but of lives that don’t belong to her. Or, to put it another way, she uses the backstory to teach herself that these lives do belong to her, by virtue of the attention she gives them; by virtue of shared citizenship; by virtue of a shared world. One hopes that when Kraus next writes about lives other than her own, she might just begin with these assumptions already in place.
Emily Ogden is professor of English at the University of Virginia
The Four Spent the Day Together
Chris Krauss
Scribe, 320pp, £16.99
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This article appears in the 16 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Emperor