Books

Chris Kraus
The Four Spent the Day Together

Best known for her cult classic I Love Dick (1997), a work that fused confessional memoir, literary criticism and fiction, Chris Kraus’s new novel, The Four Spent the Day Together, is an episodic journey into the life of Catt Greene. From an early childhood move from the Bronx to suburban Connecticut, then into adulthood as a moderately successful writer, Catt moves between work in Los Angeles and summers in rural Minnesota’s Iron Range – a cold, green landscape reminiscent of New Zealand, where she spent time as a troubled teenager. She and her partner, therapist Paul Garcia, seek refuge away from their contrasting LA lives: Catt immersed in teaching and the art world, cynically observing her peers’ “Facebook humblebrags”, and Paul working on the bleak frontlines of addiction and urban poverty.

Their lakeside cottage does not deliver all the peace it promises. Paul’s escalating alcoholism constantly threatens to shatter their relationship. Catt struggles to confront their inevitable collapse; her fraught compromises and negotiations speak to the choices often faced by women artists. She is unable to fully grasp the depth of his addiction, weathering the abusive cycle of “breakdowns, repentances and promises, betrayals and interrogations”.

Structured as three interconnected novellas, the narrative culminates in Catt’s investigation into a meth-fuelled murder involving four teenagers in a nearby, economically devastated mining town. Having declared her own life “redundant” as source material, Catt attempts to spin the tragedy into a novel. She hopes to “crack open the flat frozen landscape and understand what went on inside the trailers, the abandoned community centers, the old wood-frame mine houses”.

Despite what its cover blurb might suggest, this is not a true-crime novel. Instead, the murder acts as an anchor, pulling nearly a century of American popular culture and politics into sharp focus. Kraus critiques the “Twitterisation” of public discourse, the abandonment of the working class and the devastating impact of cheap meth, portraying a fractured society responding to the rise of Trump and his “Make America Great Again” rhetoric. It is an attempt to make sense of chaos. Kraus bears witness to a nation reckoning with its undoing.

In this novel, Catt Greene is the author of I Love Dick, which is enjoying a revival via a television adaptation. She is grappling with the tension between her public intellectual persona and private vulnerabilities, fresh off a brush with cancel culture. Though Kraus distances herself from the term “autofiction”, this novel sits comfortably alongside works by Maggie Nelson, Sheila Heti and Olivia Laing, abandoning conventional plot and blurring the lines between fact and fiction.

Scribe, 320pp, $35

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 6, 2025 as "Chris Kraus, The Four Spent the Day Together".

For almost a decade, The Saturday Paper has published Australia’s leading writers and thinkers. We have pursued stories that are ignored elsewhere, covering them with sensitivity and depth. We have done this on refugee policy, on government integrity, on robo-debt, on aged care, on climate change, on the pandemic.

All our journalism is fiercely independent. It relies on the support of readers. By subscribing to The Saturday Paper, you are ensuring that we can continue to produce essential, issue-defining coverage, to dig out stories that take time, to doggedly hold to account politicians and the political class.

There are very few titles that have the freedom and the space to produce journalism like this. In a country with a concentration of media ownership unlike anything else in the world, it is vitally important. Your subscription helps make it possible.

Send this article to a friend for free.