The Four Spent the Day Together

by Chris Kraus

“Chris Kraus reinvents the true-crime novel.” — The New Yorker

“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 humor, too.” —Rachel Kushner, author of Creation Lake

An unforgettable new novel from the “powerfully original” (Dwight Garner, The New York Times) author of the cult classic I Love Dick—a stark, witty journey into a fractured, violent America, culminating in the investigation of a teenage murder on Minnesota’s Iron Range.

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, depressed town, on the fringes of the so-called “meth community,” the three young people were quickly arrested and imprisoned.

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. Locked into a period of personal turmoil, moving between LA and Minnesota—between the art world and the urban poverty of Paul’s addiction therapist jobs, the rural poverty of the icy, depressed 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 brutality and despair surrounding the murder and to understand the teenagers’ lives, Catt is led back to 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 tensions of unclaimed futures and unchosen circumstances in the age of social media, paralyzing interconnectedness, and the ever-widening gulf between the rich and poor.

Genres: Fiction, Mystery, True Crime, Novels, Thriller, Audiobook, Crime

320 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 7, 2025

About the author

Chris Kraus is a writer and critic. She studied acting and spent almost two decades making performances and experimental films in New York before moving to Los Angeles where she began writing. Her novels include Aliens & Anorexia, I Love Dick, Torpor, and Summer of Hate. She has published three books of cultural criticism—Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness, Where Art Belongs, and Social Practices. I Love Dick was adapted for television and her literary biography After Kathy Acker was published by Semiotext(e) and Penguin Press. A former Guggenheim Fellow, Kraus held the Mary Routt Chair of Writing at Scripps College in 2019 and was Writer-in-Residence at ArtCenter College between 2020–2024. She has written for various magazines and has been a coeditor of the independent press Semiotext(e) since 1990. 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.

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Everybody was on Twitter all the time. Trump’s tweets were a big thing. And I always thought that the reasonable cultural world would do a one-eighty and completely distance themselves from that kind of meanness and cruelty and picking and scapegoating, but it was the opposite. Everyone mimicked it. It was one scapegoat after another.’

Oh wow, The Four Spent the Day Together by Chris Kraus completely sneaks up on you. On paper, it’s just four people spending a day together, but Kraus has this magical way of making the mundane feel so intense. Conversations, silences, little gestures…everything feels loaded with meaning. I found myself completely absorbed in the ebb and flow of their interactions.

If you’re expecting a murder mystery or a big dramatic plot twist, you’ll be waiting a while, but that’s totally okay. The real magic is in the characters, their quirks, and the subtle tension simmering under the surface. Kraus writes people so realistically that you feel like you’re eavesdropping on someone’s life and, honestly, it’s kind of addictive. I absolutely love Chris Kraus and everything she brings to her work, her insight into human behavior is just unmatched.

If you’re into character driven stories that linger long after you close the book, this one’s an absolute gem.

I Highly Recommend.

Thank you Scribe for my early readers copy.

Available Now!

[Suz · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5⭐

I am extremely behind on my reviews, and as is often the case, my book memory may let me down. This is my first from Chris Kraus so I’m definitely late to the party. I felt a mix of emotions, the reader must be prepared for a non linear experience, where the different timelines may not necessarily blend with a contemporary fluidity. I think my strange experience contributed to my expectations of the title, and the assumption of this in linking with the main event. What I held onto more were the characters in the build up, the representation of the alcoholic, the enabler and the cycle this will inevitably play off against each other in a myriad of push pull in the extreme swinging ways (this was excellent - I think the author has a second sense).

There’s serious stuff here with Catt, who’s built her own empire, and teaches at College while being married to this alcoholic. Catt’s story shows how fast things can spiral online. She goes from being a cool, radical voice to getting slammed for owning rental properties, suddenly she’s “the landlord” and the internet’s favorite villain, she’s a hated woman.

Kraus nails how cancel culture flattens messy, real lives into easy outrage, espousing veracity with zero f&$Ks given.

This is unlike anything I’ve encountered, a completely unexpected experienced not aligning to a connectable genre (which my brain always tends to need!).

A definite artist, I am completely interested in reading I Love Dick. This is smart, highly skilled writing.

Thank you to the publisher for my review copy, which comes with a ‘I am very sorry this review is so late, it’s been hectic in my neck of the woods’ caveat.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a surprising book from Kraus, far more straightforward and conventional than I'd expect from her. I wonder if it's in a deliberate dialogue with Hillbilly Elegy, a phrase that is used in uncapitalized form in the text though, clearly, Kraus' politics are quite different?

This traces American lives of poverty, mental health and meth and alcohol addiction interspersed with online sexual transactions. And it reads as true crime despite the novelised framework.

I'm really not sure what to make of this as it feels fragmented across the three parts despite the family connections. And the subject matter of hopeless lives set against the first Trump administration has been done before. Still an important topic but I expected more of an angle from Kraus.

Thanks to Scribe UK for an ARC via Netgalley

[Douglas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chris Kraus’s latest novel is a literary bait and switch. What begins at a seaside Connecticut bungalow ends with a cross-country spiral into murder, meth, and mayhem.

Although I somehow missed it in the synopsis, the entire first section is set in Connecticut - Milford and Bridgeport, to be exact. This novel is so deeply invested in place. Going into it not knowing about the Connecticut setting was a pleasant surprise. I happened to live and work in that part of Connecticut for a time, and the setting was so familiar that I found myself rooting as if it was its own character.

Part 1 (Milford) sets up the story, but it didn’t feel like it went beyond that, and I kept waiting for the promise of Rachel Kushner’s bold blurb on the front cover: “I read everything Chris Kraus writes.” Instead, it read more like a family photo album - memories listed chronologically, but without much narrative propulsion. I think this was done on purpose, because it eventually starts to spark. The first section is really just a volleyball set setting up the spike of Part 2: Balsam, which opens:

“The first time Catt saw the gray house in Balsam, she was sick with desire. It was an old-fashioned cottage, one and a half stories tall, perfectly located. Set halfway up the hill of a big rolling meadow, it sat a few hundred yards back from a small oval lake.” She later continues, “The afternoon sun filtered through the pine trees, and Catt thought she heard a faraway cackling loon.” Loons are often described as tranquil, but their call is haunting and jarring and can take the hearer out of the calm. Kraus’s writing is doing the same thing.

With Balsam, the novel lifts linguistically and narratively. What follows - murder, crime, drugs, escape, road trips, and family trauma happens in the relative calm of the serene settings.

Catt & Paul, the main characters, leave Minnesota for the West Coast and back (no spoilers), but it becomes clear this is a novel about the restless search for belonging, and the ways self-sabotage keeps that belonging always out of reach.

The ending includes a text exchange that echoes the climactic tension of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, though perhaps not quite as masterfully executed.

While I was rooting for Catt, and by extension Kraus, to soar, the narrative didn’t quite reach the heights I hoped for in some places. As a setup for a future film, though? Brilliant.

Thanks to Scribner and Goodreads for the review copy.

I’m definitely intrigued by Kraus and want to read more of her work. I read that she was influenced by Kathy Acker and Marguerite Duras which makes perfect sense. I would throw in Kim Addonizio, Kate Braverman, and Ann Beattie.

[None Ofyourbusiness Loves Israel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kraus follows four semi feral intellectuals who treat conversation like a contact sport and friendship like an avant garde experiment that got loose from the lab. They gather for a day that stretches into several loosely tethered episodes. They wander, quarrel, theorize, confess, posture, and occasionally resemble recognizable humans. It is a roaming symposium that hops between their interior monologues and the assorted ghosts of past projects, half ruined romances, art world debris, and the general suspicion that life has become one long performance review from the universe.

Each of the four is set up with a personal crisis that is equal parts real wound and self inflicted hobby. One drifts through family memories that refuse to stay politely in the past. Another keeps rewriting her days as if life is a film waiting on final edits. A third pursues academic obsessions with the zeal of someone avoiding actual feelings, and the fourth tries to hold their collective chaos together even while sinking under her own backlog of regrets.

They keep circling each other in talky, funny, sometimes maddening patterns. The day becomes a pressure cooker for their rivalries, loyalties, and the kind of affection that hides under layers of irony and jargon like a shy animal.

The novel gives you a mosaic of scenes, arguments, ideas, and recollections. Their conversations ricochet between philosophy, resentment, art theory, money troubles, parental hauntings, old lovers, new disappointments, and the eternal struggle to understand their own choices. Every chapter feels like a salon that overran its time slot. Every memory they dredge up carries a secret bruise.

Across this drifting, occasionally funny, spiky day, you watch the four scramble for dignity, connection, and some working definition of adulthood. They try to keep their bond intact while the world tugs at every loose strand.

What passes for plot is the slow reveal of who they are beneath the cleverness. What passes for action is the creeping realization that affection can survive pettiness, pretension, and the occasional emotional sucker punch.

Does anything explode. No. Does anyone transform into a better person. Please.

So. Was the book boring? The writing is trying to capture thought itself, which is noble in theory but mostly no fun. The plot drifts. The four characters drift. Reality drifts. Everything drifts except your patience, which tries to escape.

Still, here is the grudging confession. The book is not actually lazy. It is deliberate. It lives in that weird zone where the point is not what happens but how these four minds grind against each other like an underfunded think tank that forgot to lock the door. If you wanted momentum, you get meandering. If you wanted narrative tension, you get existential group therapy.

The book is uneven but interesting in the stubborn way a stray cat is interesting. It doesn't perform tricks. It doesn't walk in a straight line. It doesn't give you what you want when you want it. But every now and then it looks up and hits you with a moment of real insight about how people cling to each other even when the world keeps trying to pry them apart.

The strongest part of the book sits in its portrait of friendships that have calcified into tiny, chaotic ecosystems. These people know each others weak points better than their own bank PINs. It is messy in a believable way. It is also often annoying, which is also believable, because people are often annoying.

Identity is never as stable as we pretend. Every character is busy revising the story they tell about themselves, sometimes in real time. Friendships are built out of shared failures as much as shared joyd. People are trying to figure out who they are while tripping over who they used to be. Friendships contain layers of affection, resentment, and loyalty. Creative lives wobble between inspiration and delusion. These themes stick because they describe the ongoing human disaster in all its glory. However, nothing here is new or very original.

If you find the book boring, you are not wrong. But if you tilt your head and squint, there is a decent chance the book is less about boredom and more about the rhythm of real internal life, which is not exactly a Marvel movie. It is thought, doubt, repetition, insecurity, hope, disappointment, and those rare seconds where everything inside your skull lines up and you understand yourself for half a heartbeat.

"... The next morning she found an empty quart of vodka underneath the mattress while she was packing.

Yes, he confessed, I’ve been drinking. I drink. Don’t you get it? It was late Friday night. They were back home in Balsam and Paul would be catching the 6 a.m. flight from Harding back to LA and his job in South Central. And I want to keep drinking! Drunk and enraged and backed into a corner, he took off his gold wedding ring and threw it down on the table. I don’t want to be married to you. I only ever married you because of your money. You’re old and you’re ugly.

The next day he called and profusely apologized.

Did I sleep that night? Catt wrote in her notebook much later. I don’t remember. The usual feeling of filth that surrounded these episodes.

He was drunk and upset, he didn’t mean any of it.

And soon I was weeping, confiding, lamenting, Catt wrote. I’d wanted so badly for this to be over—I didn’t realize then I was being led back into the cage. And I was leaving again in two days for Detroit, Chicago, New York, and Champaign-Urbana.

Alcohol is an evil spirit, Paul would tell Catt on the brink of yet another relapse several years later. Why kill the addict? It would be a waste of suffering. It would be the last relapse she witnessed. The evil spirit would rather use the alcohol to destroy everything and everyone around him..."

[Franklin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Structurally this book was bad, ending on the disturbed, severe and muddy that you really have no connection to or and really investment / stakes in, left a lot to be desired. It reads as fetishistic and lacks Kraus’ best quality , a sense of self awareness that places her right in the middle of the problem. Here throughout she seems to be in total defense, which is boring and drives the (non) narrative nowhere. I think if she began the book with the murder and ended with her childhood a much stronger dichotomy would have played out.
But trying to find solutions to a finished project is futile and better to let sleeping dogs lie

[Lee Foust · Rating 5 out of 5]

The American Proust strikes again! Another terrific installment in the thematic series of autobiographical novels by (in my opinion) the USA'a greatest living author. (I realized she was that back when that old hack who wrote about cowboys and killing machines croaked and everyone was all "America's greatest writer has died" and I had occasion to wonder who really was the greatest working novelist in the USA and I realized Chris Kraus, for me, was it: vital, honest, working class, deeply thoughtful, angry as fuck.)

Speaking of dumb twitter comments, I had no idea, either, that she's been lynched on Twitter by an angry mob of academics who always think working class people are not radical enough because without a trust fund of heavy academic appointment you can't afford the jail time. Anyway, such silly flack only solidifies the kinship I feel with Kraus in her struggle to arrive at a truth through writing fiction.

Here the form is beguiling. The author's parents' story and childhood are interwoven with her dissolving marriage to an addict who can't seem to remain clean (who would in a world as racist, empty, and bleak as that construcyed by capitalism in the USA), the discovery of a kind of sanctuary house in the Iron Range in northern Minnesota, and a kind of In Cold Blood true crime that plays itself out in that neighborhood while our protagonist Katt lives there. As usual, Kraus's two worlds, working class America and the academic art and philosophy worlds combine in an orgy of humanness. Since I, too, am human, a teacher, an avid reader of both fiction and once postmodern and Marxist theory, and a product of the working class, it's hard to imagine a better novel or a better novelist than Kraus is here.

[emily]

‘What is it like to have I Love Dick achieve success after so many years? People asked her over and over. Twenty-sixteen was the moment of the aging, underrecognized white female artist, and journalists wrote coverage of the coverage. How does it feel to be an icon? Catt understood she was being called upon to become a motivational speaker and she found she could excel at this. Some nights she lit up and felt herself becoming a transmitter, drawing people's energy into her heart and bouncing it back to them. Other nights she felt fraudulent and cheesy.’

Wrong book, wrong time, and most certainly the wrong reader. DNF-ed — stopped somewhere around over a hundred pages or so ? I thought I’ve already made peace with the fact that I prefer/like Kraus’ non-fiction/essays, and much less her fiction/novels, yet I persist — with the silly (biblio) attempts — so ultimately the fault is mine. If you like Torpor, this is for you. This one reminded me of that — mostly because of the slight autobiographical elements (or rather what seems/feels to be) and also in terms of style of writing and tone. I like her essay collection You Must Make Your Death Public a lot more than this.

‘In less than three days, she'd be leaving the cabin to teach in the Swiss Alps for a week with her soon-to-be ex-husband—a critic and philosophy professor—In New York, he'd studied and taught post-political politics. Catt could tell Mikal resented her recent cultural currency, though she could not understand why. He of all people must have known that internet fame meant next to nothing. Once, they'd imagined being buried alongside each other under a tree like Virginia and Leonard Woolf—Now the shared teaching gig was pretty much all that remained of their deep alliance.’

‘—drove through Nevada and Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota with their little dog Blaze dressed in a red hand-dyed sweater. Catt had bought it for him from an expensive new ethical shop on the Lower East Side the last time she'd read in New York. How much, she'd asked herself then, can one spend on a scented candle? The answer was $73.’’

[nathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Major thanks to NetGalley and Scribner for sending me an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest thoughts:

"𝘚𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘛𝘳𝘶𝘮𝘱’𝘴 𝘦𝘭𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘛𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘻𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘴𝘩𝘦’𝘥 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘸𝘰𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳 𝘪𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘢 𝘱𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘸𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘣𝘰𝘰𝘬𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘺𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦. 𝘈𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘩𝘰 𝘧𝘰𝘳? 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘪𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘤𝘳𝘶𝘦𝘭𝘵𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘛𝘳𝘶𝘮𝘱 𝘦𝘳𝘢 𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘷𝘦𝘪𝘭 𝘰𝘧𝘧 𝘴𝘰𝘤𝘪𝘢𝘭 𝘣𝘦𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘪𝘰𝘳 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘰𝘺𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘶𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘩𝘶𝘮𝘢𝘯 𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘦 𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘥."

This is actually my first Krauss as I’ve been meaning to get to I Love Dick just for the title alone. But this was an interesting introduction to her work as it mixes autofiction, fiction, and plays into current events if we can call the present historical fiction, with some of the book written purely in text message exchanges. There’s murder. Addiction. Runaways. A lot here to like as it reminds me of Capote’s In Cold Blood. Written with a true crime nonfiction voice that dictates the dark underbelly of America, but that’s just the problem: they’re so much in experimentation that it detracts from some of the character building and plot itself. And this is coming from someone who just ‘not plot, just vibes’ quite often!

I didn’t particularly enjoy my time with this one, perhaps, mostly by how uncomfortable it made me feel, especially so adjacent to our present. But that’s exactly what I like about it, the challenges it offers to see that the fine line between fiction and reality is one of direct application. How does one live in a world that is immediately fictionalized? What carries through? What is extracted? How do the terrors of our current world reflect in fiction? How do we work it all out? Make it better? And so I left the book into the immediate world, gritting my teeth through the harshness with a little more kindness.

[Justine · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5⭐️ This is well-written, but the three parts felt like separate stories. It’s like the author didn’t have enough material for a full length novel so loosely linked three different stories.

[Livi · Rating 1 out of 5]

Imagine using auto fiction to defend being a landlord and crossing a picket line, and also expressing distain for the (mainly young women) readers of your most famous work?

The whole thing feels a bit icky.

[Grace]

Would love to know other people’s opinions tbh!

[Sophia Eck · Rating 2 out of 5]

Complete and utter mess

This book completely severs itself from or truncates any of the ostensibly valuable social commentary it claims to offer, and instead comes across as a speed run of how quickly can a white woman make anything and everything about herself.

Our main character Catt (short for Catherine but she changed it to Catt because she was a superrrr edgy teen) basically embodies the stereotype of the intellectual gifted child turned burnout grunge teen turned insufferable white female millennial, the kind who loves to white knuckle grip and refuse to part with their white feminism and millennial dread.

Kraus attempts semblances of political commentary by making the family of her main character in the first part of the novel “working class”, by extremely insensitively touching on topics of childhood disability, by abruptly dropping in obvious and brief political updates from the time of the Trump and Biden administrations but providing no semblance of valuable or really any commentary, and by almost constantly egotistically acknowledging in drive by comments the lives of everyone who doesn’t get by with the same privilege our main character does and how much that really bums her out :( Kraus tries to communicate the struggles of the American working class, and classes below that, with a character that owns multiple properties, is a successful author, can take significant time off of work, and is the landlord of a set of apartments that she delegates off to be managed by a family of color that she absolutely dismisses any time they ask for advisement. Kraus’ self insert and her main character, Catt, is truly just so out of touch and self indulgent that she takes over and steamrolls the entire novel and any valuable topics in both the first and the second part of the novel with how she was a intellectual genius child turned edgy unlikable teenager, her indecision of whether to divorce her alcoholic husband who is just about as insensitive if not more than she is, and her whining about and refusal to engage with any criticism she receives on her writing.

The third part of the novel attempts to embody some type of true crime narrative, and a commentary on the violence and drug abuse common in low income areas, but ends up just being another upper middle class woman prying into the lives of people she wants to take advantage of for a story to write to make herself more money.

I cannot tell if this book is supposed to be so deeply insufferable and steeped with white savior complex, but that’s what I found it to be, as well as just being a complete mess of 3 meandering pseudo-woke barely connected parts that truly didn’t accomplish anything together or apart. Cannot believe what we are publishing these days.. this reads like 3 separate rough drafts with no valuable connectivity, narrative consistency, or concept of its purpose, that clumsily narratively stomps around a sad collection of pompous privileged lackluster attempts at commentary on class politics that we are supposed to think are unique and valuable, but are really just shallow offerings of the vague concepts of current issues thrown here and there with no perceivable purpose.

[claudia r]

somewhere in here is a valiant and admirable attempt to reckon with 2015-2021 identity politics by bridging the experiences of kraus (and her family history) with the “four” troubled Minnesotan young adults of the book’s title. but i found myself questioning the book’s structure too much for this to totally resonate - there are moments where it really does, to be sure - but often it felt like there was a better version of this book just out of reach.

[Luke McCarthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really weird, unsettling book. I feel like Kraus is trying to locate some cohesive sense of what it means to be a person in our current moment, contrasting the petty and inane violence of our mediated ‘social media’ world with the genuinely ugly and cruel violence of the ‘real world’ – a world that is still there, and getting worse irregardless. I loved the writing; very clean and borderline-journalistic. Oddly, this was the perfect novel to read after Mary Midgley’s ‘Wickedness’.

[Gideonleek · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some good writing in the first third but after that disaster

[raniera]

loved this for reasons I don’t want to elaborate on, actually. thanks to Olivia for buying this and then handing it to me on the bus home. I was not going to spend £17. but I did so enjoy it. like a mirror of parts of my life. like she’s my Kathy acker but way more parasocial than her actual connection. anyway. #wellingtonalum!

[Andy Weston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kraus’s ambitious novel is based around her own childhood in 1960s Connecticut, and then later in her life in the north of Minnesota.

It’s in three distinct parts. In the first, Jasper and Emma Greene and their daughters, Catt and Carla, move from the Bronx to Milford, Connecticut. Emma struggles to connect with her new community, Jasper works long hours. Carla has a learning disability, while and Catt, the protagonist, has literary ambitions, though she struggles at school, moving into an adolescence of truancy and random hitchhiking.

The second part is set forty years later in 2019, the Trump years, in Minnesota’s Iron Range. Catt is a now well-regarded writer, living in Los Angeles, spending summers in Minnesota. Her relationship with her long-term partner deteriorates though Catt is dealing with the media after her first novel is adapted for TV. Her attention though is on a shocking, drug-fuelled murder close to her cottage. She is obsessed with finding out more about the four young people involved.

In the last part, Catt searches for answers to this senseless crime, alongside a fictionalised account of the events leading up to the real-life murder.

Ultimately, it’s a skilful mix of contemporary literature and a fixation true crime that blends into a gripping narrative. It took my surprise actually; I’ve been so disappointed with recent American contemporary literature that this provided a much needed boost.

[Jody · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book was a deep walk into the hell people live in with addiction. alcohol, weed, and meth were the addictions of choice in this novel. it's a sad state of affairs, that this is close to reality in today's society. in a small rural town in Minnesota, or jet setting across the globe, it'll bite you in the butt and there appears to be no way of turning back. the struggle is real. thank you Scribner for the Arc.

[Amanda Rosso · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Four Spent the Day Together is an incredible novel that initially appears far too ordinary for Chris Kraus.

However, it takes no longer than a handful of pages to start seeing the novel's progression towards the neck breaking precipitation of events that seems to be our everyday life.

This is a novel in which form does real narrative work. The plot unfolds through a prose that quietly accelerates time, drawing the reader into a rhythm where personal experience and historical urgency begin to overlap. This temporal compression is not decorative but structural, shaping how the story is told and how it is felt.

Through a dense web of intertextual and intermedial references, Chris Kraus foregrounds the constant porosity of everyday life, showing how individual trajectories are always already entangled with larger histories, and how languages constantly overlap, hybridising genres and speech, experiences and narratives.
Here, memoir, crime novel, family saga, and collective historical narrative are woven together with remarkable dexterity, producing a form in which the personal and the political cannot be disentangled. What emerges is an implacable and, at the same time, deeply empathetic portrait of the less visible corners of American life.

Central to the novel is a sharp interrogation of the figure of the so-called engaged intellectual and of the many languages through which we attempt to narrate our present and our past. Kraus spares no one, least of all herself, staging a ruthless self-scrutiny through her doppelgänger Catt. The novel exposes the hypocrisy of strategic survival under conditions of collective annihilation: the relentless pursuit of success and accomplishment unfolds alongside the systematic erasure of entire categories of people.

In this sense, The Four Spent the Day Together resonates strongly with Achille Mbembe's concept of necropolitics, and with Judith Butler’s reflections on mournability, forcing us to confront which lives are rendered visible, grievable, or disposable, and which are allowed to vanish without trace.

[Christine (Queen of Books)]

I was interested in THE FOUR SPENT THE DAY TOGETHER after hearing such good things about I Love Dick and seeing buzz like, “Chris Kraus reinvents the true-crime novel.” —The New Yorker

But I had not seen the NYT's warning not to start here, and I was unaware that it's really the last third of the novel that veers into true crime territory. The first third just seems to be historical fiction coming of age which is not working for me. Perhaps if I had read Kraus' other autofiction, I'd be more engaged. This is a soft DNF - maybe will circle back after I've read more of her work elsewhere. DNF at 10%

Thank you to Scribner for a free arc of this title.

[Pandi B C · Rating 3 out of 5]

I remember really loving I Love Dick - a false memory? I think I probably found it fantastic in some ways (pretty cool since I read only a few years ago and it was published in the 90s I think) but I probably also found it annoying, abrasive and heady at times, which was no doubt a skilfully elicited response!!! This book is in three parts and I loved the first - cozy sad and feels like the first part of a ‘proper book’ to me. The other two parts are sort of like cultural / political commentary from deep inside the Trump worlds and they are filled with epic truth but not really my thing (as I tend to want to avoid these realities when reading my books!).

[Clem McNabb · Rating 4 out of 5]

i liked this but I like chris kraus a lot and her writing is just very pleasing to me. I am not sure about the sections on cancellation - I found them interesting in terms of the politics/reality of being a landlord - but I did feel like the validity of her points was undercut sometimes by a real, slightly desperate need to level with her critics - in a different way than her other books. I am not sure what I think of this. I loved the first section of her childhood, and the writing about addiction was some of the most elegant/moving I have read. <3 chris kraus....

[Ella Slater · Rating 3 out of 5]

Awwwwww I really wanted to love this. Maybe it’s because im a bad person and like all the gory fucked up bits of true crime but this made a murder kind of feel like … an afterthought ?????

[Karen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thank you Scribner for the advanced review copy of this book.

This book definitely did not live up to my expectations of the blurb that I read. The writing style was so difficult to get into and felt so impersonal. There were way too many characters that did not add anything to the story and I wished I stopped reading this book around the 30% mark.

[Meg Bryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

It just kept getting worse.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not perfect, and I wished for a lot more from the ending, but Kraus always manages to entrance me. This spans a lot of different material--Kraus' fictionalization of her childhood, her marriage to an alcoholic, a house she buys in northern Minnesota, her experience as a landlord in Albuquerque and elsewhere, her "cancellation" in lefty art spaces and online for being a landlord, and the true crime story she becomes engrossed in as an escape from her fraught personal life. It's less overtly autofictional than her other books--it's all presented as fiction--but she doesn't try to veil much, giving her character Catt a book and a TV show called I Love Dick. Kraus is so sharp as a writer while never making sharpness the only aim. I think there could've been one more section that ties everything together--there's so much there and so much analysis along the way, but it withholds a synthetic conclusion. Still, that just means I want to read more from Chris Kraus, which I always do.

[Hetian bias · Rating 5 out of 5]

holy shit????

[Amy Kaufman · Rating 2 out of 5]

No, I'm actually so annoyed

[LLJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to #NetGalley and to #ScribnerPublishing for the opportunity to read and review #TheFourSpenttheDayTogether by #ChrisKraus. From start to finish, this book was a unique reading experience -- moving across genres and styles -- from autofiction and historical/crime fiction to the sociopolitical nightmare of our present "reality" in the US. We are living at the mercy of divisive and self-indulgent politicians and the venom of public opinion and social media algorithms and these areas were expertly depicted within the latter two sections of the book.

Kraus, somehow, got all of the above packed into this book and the entire third (and final) section was devoted to a researched account of a murder (committed by teenagers) which took place in the Iron Range of Minnesota's North Country. The entirety of the book (all three sections) touches heavily and vividly on bullying, drug and alcohol addiction, poverty and class divisions, deficits in social services (for disability, addiction, and youth in jeopardy) and moves from the Bronx to Milford, CN and from Los Angeles to rural Minnesota among other places. Catt Greene, a fictionalized depiction of the author, is a large presence and connector between all three sections of the book. Not knowing much about Chris Kraus' personal/professional background or past work, it's difficult to say how much is purely fiction and how much is closer to memoir. Frankly, it doesn't really matter because it all "works" within the overall plot of the book.

The first section (Milford) focuses on Catt, her sister Carla, and their parents settling into Milford CN after leaving the Bronx in NYC and the themes of class, alienation, bullying, discrimination, and "fitting in" play big roles. It's a wonderful study of a family navigating the trials and tribulations of day to day life as the new people in town. Catt is elementary school age through much of this timeframe and it concludes with a final move out of the country but left me, as a reader, steeped in the feelings of uncertainty and awkwardness that plagued everyone in the family, especially Catt.

The second part of the book focused on Catt as an adult and covered a handful of her most pivotal relationships (most distinctly her first marriage and then her tortured ongoing relationship with her partner, Paul, who spends much of the section deep in the throes of alcohol addiction and the rollercoaster of recovery and relapse). Honestly, this was one of the best depictions I've read of an alcoholic/addict in the mental and physical insanity of craving, obsession, depression, and self-hatred.

The second section is also insidiously "current" in pre and post pandemic life in the US (particularly in the divisiveness and confused messaging of the country's leadership and the role of social media and mass media in dictating the heroes and the villains of any random timeframe).

Catt Greene (as an artist and in relation to her other endeavors) falls to the mercy of public opinion and is demonized, for quite some time, by real and anonymous detractors based on incomplete and skewed information. Living through the past 8-10 years in real life, it is plain to see how easily information and people are manipulated. These are the themes of the second section and in the final section Catt decides to turn her attention to a local crime in which three teenagers murder a slightly older man and she attempts to break down the "why" and analyze things more closely.. This section is devoted to research and loosely based in factual events. In the book, Catt mentions how her best work is research (essay) based and since she has been living in a sea of angst (in her relationship, work, etc.) having this project to focus on is a useful distraction.

Ultimately, the research ends up tying into the prior themes of social class, poverty, and drug/alcohol addiction - the "meth" culture in this specific area - and how lives are decided (and futures destroyed) in the presence of these factors.

I give the book 4.5 stars and highly recommend it. I think I need to reread it to fully appreciate how the sections weave together (in the themes mentioned above) but the book is out on Tuesday 10/7 and I wanted to get this review up and posted in advance. I will mention that I read through the other 8 or 9 reviews and a few struck me as especially sharp and well thought out. I think that reflects upon the type of person who would request this book and attempt to make sense of the seemingly disjointed content. In the finally analysis, it is not disjointed at all. And the title is FANTASTIC!!!!

It was such an honor to get to read and review this one and I'm now going to dive deeper into Chris Kraus.