A girl’s purpling corpse, a man’s squinting eyes, a tarp, a notepad, a red herring, a scarlet letter, a long exhale—and finally, an explanation. In most true crime narratives, a woman’s dead body is a problem to be solved by a man on an almost evangelical mission, in pursuit of a motive and, usually, another man. The genre usually revolves around dead girls and detectives—or, in the more recent micro-genre devoted to forgotten, unsolved crimes, intrepid podcasters and journalists—and culminates in revelations that quell the audience’s ballooning anxiety. But true crime’s telephoto lens zooms in on individuals, obscuring the systems that molded and often mangled their psyches, a reality that renders the notion of motive reductive, if not insidiously obfuscating.
Chris Kraus’s latest novel, The Four Spent the Day Together, offers an X-ray of the genre’s rapidly fracturing foundations. The ingredients here are a lost day, a potentially violated girl who will end up incarcerated instead of dead, a few boys, a lot of methamphetamine, a broken addiction-treatment system, an almost-as-broken car, a gun, and very little detective work. Confessions come easily, while answers remain elusive, especially to the one question that fictional detectives and true-crime obsessives alike pursue with religious devotion: why?
Kraus’s oeuvre makes a mockery of the very word “why.” Studious attention to ostensible accidents allows systemic forces to come to the fore; Kraus is aware that a fixation on the interpersonal distracts by sealing the drama in the drawing room. Before it becomes an investigatory project, The Four Spent the Day Together is a fictionalized account of the writer’s childhood, defined by what she calls the “constriction” of her parents’ pursuit of the American Dream, and a marriage story that chronicles a relationship’s demise at the hands of alcoholism against the backdrop of #MeToo and cancel culture writ large.
Kraus’s crime story is set in Minnesota’s Iron Range, an impoverished stretch of stunning wilderness where local teenagers drink at desiccated, abandoned mines called “pit lakes.” There, the author’s autofictional avatar, Catt Greene, and her husband, Paul Garcia, purchase a home, hoping to escape the literal and existential claustrophobia of their coastal urban milieu. Events converge in constellations: The traditional notion of a masterplot becomes more of a Big Bang theory, evincing a religious devotion to the random. Teenage Catt is curious about what happens when you follow the current of your luck, hence her passion for diving headfirst into risky situations, patronizing biker bars and hitchhiking. Adult, her reportorial style attends to the influence of chance in service of restoring, rather than evacuating, nuanced meaning to stories too easily read as predestined. Wordplay provides agency to marginalized figures forced into a dangerous game of chance.
The crimes that interest Catt—legal and interpersonal—have perpetrators but are devoid of villains. These perpetrators are severed from their own intentions by addiction. They are estranged from themselves, unable to recall the series of events or the chain of command, making the project of identifying the villain—the person who, in Chuck Klosterman’s definition, “knows the most but cares the least”—becomes laughably absurd, a tragicomic artifact of a time before addiction compounded the economic decimation of entire swaths of the U.S., before ineffective, profit-hungry treatment centers ruined landscapes. The crime that interests Kraus is not one of passion—passion requires feeling—but one of raw chaos, unfolding within the hollow surreality of a drug binge.
Kraus’s writing is an exercise in extended eye contact—through the discomfort, finding grace in a stranger’s twitching iris. When she’s not writing, Kraus shepherds other people’s words into the world. She and Hedi El Kholti continue to steer their small press, Semiotext(e), toward “the books that feel most vital and important, the books that help us make sense of the present moment,” whether those are reissues or new works from emerging voices.
Just after the publication of The Four Spent the Day Together earlier this month, Kraus and I met over Zoom to discuss attention, chance, noir, addiction, stargazing, and more for CULTURED.
This book, like all your writing, is rife with gorgeous lines. One I thought might be a jumping off point is when Catt wonders, “Had she used up her life? She started to think she should write about somebody else.” Your oeuvre has never read to me as purely first-person personal–After Kathy Acker and Aliens & Anorexia are as much about Kathy Acker and Simone Weil as they are about your autofictional avatars. What did Catt mean?
I needed to pivot out of the story of Paul Garcia’s addiction and their marriage into the crime and the kids. I think my novels have captured decades of my life—not just my life, but people and places and things that I encountered during that period of my life. You could say, even though I wrote it much later, that I Love Dick is a book of your 20s, Torpor is a book of your 30s, Summer of Hate is a book of your 40s, and maybe this one comes from a place of later middle age. How you see things very much depends on where you are in life.
Most of your books merge genres—ricocheting from theory to autofiction to biography and back. This book felt, instead, like three projects in different genres: an intergenerational saga, a marriage story reckoning with addiction, and an eccentric, oblique approach to true crime. Why silo rather than intertwine those genres?
A genre is a container for something that you want to do. I don’t think any literary writer sets out to work primarily in this or that genre. You set out to treat ideas and feelings that are troubling and obsessing you. You’re in pursuit of an idea or a story and it eventually finds its genre. It could swing wildly between different genres, as we do in the course of a day or a week.
Catt recalls when “she empathized her way into a hospital” after someone she had an artistic and interpersonal fixation with ended up in one, which reminded me of the way Aliens & Anorexia’s protagonist experiences anorexia symptoms almost empathically, out of an excess of attention to Simone Weil’s life. Your writing about cancel culture seems to note a certain void of that empathic attentiveness in the online commentariat.
That’s a great point. Attention, of course, is the greatest thing that anyone can offer. The best thing is to feel yourself seen and recognized by another person. It takes a certain slowing down and openness to do that. That is what a novel does. That’s why we love novels; we start to know the inner lives of characters as well as we know our own, and that’s so seductive.
You think through MeToo in this book, and seem to conclude that perhaps the Me was privileged over the Too, that maybe we misdirected our attention towards individualistic over solidaristic narratives, which was interesting to me in light of the duplicitous role of the ‘I’ narrator in your work. What do you think went awry?
It felt like such a strange, hysterical moment. I think people didn’t know how to handle it. So initially, MeToo was a gift. It was a great liberation that in the midst of all this darkness and negativity, something so important could happen. Reckoning with decades of subservience to patriarchal systems, with the objectification and whims of men. It felt as though real progress could be made. But it quickly turned, and I think that is a result of social media. There always has to be another log thrown on the fire. The media always needs a new log.
In many of your novels, the political situation is a sickening miasma your narrator is stumbling through. Her present tense narration is free-associative and digressive, dipping into lengthy asides at the slightest trigger. In this novel, the political situation is more a war-torn landscape—politics crops up suddenly and then fades away. Was that a purposeful shift?
Yes, I really wanted to understand the internal realities of people’s lives on the Iron Range. The failure in empathy comes from the progressive political class in the metropolis—it’s very hard for us to imagine that not everyone is like us, that other people have completely different senses of ambition and purpose and meaning. There was a comment Robert Reich made once that I found so alienating. He was criticizing people in these Rust Belt zones, asking, Why don’t they get a moving van? It doesn’t occur to him that their meaning doesn’t come from their careers. Their meaning comes from living among their families, in the places where their grandparents are buried, where their parents live, where they have a history, where they grew up. To write about other people, to enter another world, you have to accept that we’re not all the same.
True crime stories traditionally star a dead woman and a male detective, but the crime you chose to investigate transgresses that format. Was that a purposeful subversion?
The thing that bothers me most about true crime is the way it’s always the police’s story. The narrative involves the solving of the crime and the purpose of solving the crime is to prosecute the perpetrator. Carolina Miranda and I were talking about the difference between noir and true crime. Noir is so much sexier and more exciting because it gets into the juice: the subtext and the desire and the motivation behind the crime. It gets into the mindset and the psychic atmosphere within the crime.
You’ve said you want to see a “female adventure heroine,” and your work has investigated the thrills and risks of embracing chance as a woman. Was Catt attempting to become a female adventure heroine? That figure, here and elsewhere in your work, engages with a tension between yearning to connect with other women and finding men more likely to take a girl somewhere she’s never been before, logistically and existentially.
Thirteen-year-old Catt in the first section of the book is completely reckless and oblivious to all consequences. But that’s a very thirteen-year-old thing. Have you ever seen the movie Thirteen? It’s a hallucination, just like the crime [in this novel] was a hallucination. A hallucination can occur among a group of people who are very psychically connected. But yes, Catt craved adventure. She was so bored by the constriction of the family—what made the family feel so constricted was their need to pretend and conceal, which is a phenomenon of lower middle class life.
I remember when I was a young teenager hitchhiking, the few times that I got picked up by women were absolutely thrilling. I remember getting a ride from two girls who were so cool—they finally gave me something I could aspire to. There were so few female things in the culture then that anyone at all energetic or alert could aspire to. It was such a bovine existence. Another great hitchhiking experience happened when I was living with Sylvère [Lotringer] in Springs, the suburb of East Hampton. We shared a car, so when Sylvère went into the city, I would have to hitchhike into town. One time I got picked up by [the writer] Dore Ashton, and she lectured me about how dangerous it was to get high. [Laughs].
Getting lectured by Dore Ashton while actively endangering my life sounds like an amazing way to feel alive, for once. While we’re talking women, the attention to feminized forms of abjection that characterizes a lot of your work seems channelled, here, towards forms of abjection that exist across or in spite of gender, like poverty and addiction.
I was just exchanging messages with someone on Instagram this morning, whose name I don’t know and who I’ve never met, but who has been reading my book. After messaging for a couple months, they finally told me that their spouse is an alcoholic living several doors away from them, and that their spouse can move back if they’re six months sober, but they can barely manage six days. There’s so much addiction in the world now, and especially the United States. I think everyone who’s not an addict themselves is living alongside it in some way. Addiction is an evil that will suck everything into its vortex. No matter how much the loved one tries to help the addict, the addiction will destroy that help.
For both the addict and those who love them, addiction warps time. There’s a moment in this book when Catt feels like “she’s swimming in time, instead of drowning in it.” Can you talk about how temporality functions here, given the different scales of time across the storylines, from an intergenerational saga to a marriage to a single day?
A novel is built out of time. That’s, for me, the essential primary ingredient of the novel: how does it treat time? Does it take place over an hour? Over several decades? generations? That observation of Catt’s about swimming in time was the great lure of the wilderness in the Iron Range: to be out of the metropolitan area, living on a wilderness timeline. It is so radically restorative to enter that kind of parallel time, and we forget that it’s available to us. We can go camping, we can be out of cell range, and we’re suddenly inhabiting an entirely different kind of time.
Your conception of time feels tied to the way you’ve spoken about chance—you have said that “female chance is so much more defenseless and wild than male chance.” That notion undergirded Catt’s young life and Brittany’s life before and during the crime.
That’s so true. In Aliens & Anorexia, my character is talking about the reality that when a young woman starts to follow random paths, she’s inevitably going to put herself in danger. She’ll get raped, kidnapped, beaten up. The threat of rape is omnipresent. In this book, Brittany, the girlfriend of the perpetrator and instigator of the crime, was addicted to meth at 14. But her rebellion, before the meth addiction, took the form of sex work because she noticed very early on as a 12 or 13 year old girl that she’d become the object of weird attention from men in the town. I’m sure it was a very conflicting experience: both aggrandizing and diminishing. Being a clever, ambitious girl, she chose to monetize it.
Catt studies the text messages and depositions of the teenagers who committed the crime, which she hopes will reveal their interiority, the nuances of their relationships to each other. But “she could find no answers.” Were you gesturing towards the spiritual void that addiction can create?
I have to agree with the probably Christian and Trump-voting homicide detective who comments, in the book, that meth catalyzed an evil spirit that’s always somewhere in the air. That group hallucination of young people having a secret bond that the rest of the world doesn’t understand, that’s already very intoxicating. When you add a drug like meth, it does somehow open the door to all kinds of evil. There’s this psychosis that people experience on meth. People behave in a blind way that makes no sense to them afterwards.
That feeling of wild randomness, the lack of a traditional motive or chain of events—maybe chance actually allows the social problems that really cause these kinds of crimes to come through?
The idea of a motive is very old fashioned. The true crime genre thrives on it—the scorned wife killing the lover and the husband. But one of the homicide detectives said to me that, in his almost two decade career, there hasn’t been a single homicide that did not involve meth. These are not premeditated murders. These are just random killings at the tail end of a meth binge.
You’ve spoken about hoping this book spotlights the dire status quo in this country around addiction, and offers solidarity to partners of addicts—are you at all worried about it being misread in the fetishizing way true crime books are often consumed, considering your writing in this book about feeling that I Love Dick was misconstrued?
I have to admit, I Love Dick was a kunstlerroman. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was definitely a coming of age story, whether I liked it or not. We don’t always like coming of age—it’s painful. I thought I was writing about all these other serious topics: philosophy, politics, history. But really, it was a coming of age story. So can you blame people for picking up on that, because it was always there? With this book, I don’t think people can miss the addiction aspects. That’s all over everything. The senselessness of the crime is inescapable. I hope that people, by reading the book, confront this senselessness.
What is something you find overrated, underrated, and accurately rated?
Overrated: romantic love. Underrated: stargazing. Accurately rated: going to the gym.
in your life?
