The Four Spent the Day Together
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.
Praise for THE FOUR SPENT THE DAY TOGETHER:
“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 dramatizing the way we live now.”
– Colm Toibin
“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 Debré
“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
“It’s really, really good. Maybe the best thing she’s written.”
—Gary Indiana
“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
“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
“Unlike so many books one reads, this book is 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
“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
“What a truly unique, brilliant, surprising and bold book this is… 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… 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
US reviews:
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE SEASON by W Magazine, The Guardian, Literary Hub, Kirkus Reviews
“[The Four Spent the Day Together] is a fast-paced mystery told in three interconnected parts that culminate in a subtle reflection on class, power, and the banality of our brute instincts… a novel that considers the opacity of human nature.”
—The Paris Review
“Kraus’ relentless curiosity is a gravitational force.”
—Kirkus Review
“Kraus' writing is deliberate and hard-hitting as she lets readers draw their own conclusions about the ever-relative nature of redemption and corrupting power of capitalism.”
— Booklist
