An unforgettable new novel from the author of the modern classic I Love Dick - a witty, probing journey into a fractured America, culminating in the investigation of a teenage murder.
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, rundown town, the three young people were quickly arrested and imprisoned. No one knows why they did it.
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. Undergoing a period of personal turmoil, moving between LA and Minnesota - between the urban art world and the rural poverty of the icy 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 mystery surrounding the murder and to understand the teenagers' lives, Catt also finds herself travelling back through 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 histories of three generations of American lives and the patterns that repeat over lifetimes, and is a piercing commentary on the pressures of lives lived on the edge.
'It's really, really good. Maybe the best thing she's written.'
-Gary Indiana, author of Rent Boy
'Unlike so many books one reads, this book is like 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, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sontag- her life and work
'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 Debre, author of Name
