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“Having no talent for making shit up, she simply reported her thoughts.”
This line, from Chris Kraus’ 2011 novel, Summer of Hate, is a joke, a dare, a put-on – and an entirely serious conviction.
Decades into her career, after several collections of art criticism, an acclaimed biography of Kathy Acker, and five novels that skilfully refract and fictionalise her own life, Kraus knows one of the fates awaiting women who write like she does is to be called “bitches, libellers, pornographers and amateurs”.
Her first novel in more than a decade, The Four Spent the Day Together, reflects on and ironises contemporary America’s cultural rot. Beginning in Milford, Connecticut, during the 1960s, it chronicles decay across three linked chapters, reflecting on the (first) Trump election, online cancellation, the hollowing-out of the working and middle class, and a frightening murder case.
“When I moved to LA, it was a sleepy, affordable city,” Kraus says. “Now it’s impossible. No one who depends on a salary can live here. It’s really only for people who have independent wealth, like all the other megalopolises.”
Kraus is talking to me from her book-lined house in Baja near the border of California and Mexico, where, for the past 20 years, she has gone to write. She pitches words like baseballs, each a little angled at the corners. Moving expansively across subjects – often her sentences end in upward peaks of surprise or affirmation, as though she were not the one voicing them – Kraus says she felt she had to investigate the past to show the devolution of class experience in America.
“Look at my parents’ lives in the Bronx. My mother took Latin and French in her public high school. Now, almost a hundred years later, kids don’t even go to school. They have online school, which is no school at all. It’s not just education, but the devolution in every single respect. It’s all the cliches journalism talks about. No full-time jobs, people piecing things together part-time. There isn’t a working class in the US any more. It’s more of an underclass.”
Catt, the protagonist of her new novel, has moved with her parents from the East Bronx to Milford. At once idyllic and stifling, it’s the kind of place where housewives hawk World Book Encyclopedias as “the first step toward college”. Throughout, describing Catt’s childhood and adolescence, Kraus captures what it’s like to be a precocious young woman who is, ultimately, still young.
“I knew that at some point in my life I was going to write about my childhood,” she says. “So much of my parents’ reality was based on pretense. My mother, somehow, kept it afloat and made it work. But to really talk about it the way you do in a novel, truthfully, would have been very hurtful. And my parents were readers. I could never have written this while they were alive.”
It’s a surprising admission. Like Helen Garner, Kraus was occasionally pilloried when her debut appeared in 1997. Playing with the circumstances of Kraus’s own life at the time, I Love Dick tells the story of Chris, an experimental filmmaker. Chris and Sylvère, her husband, write hundreds of letters to Dick, a cultural studies professor whose home they briefly visit. (His real-life model, British critic Dick Hebdige, was aghast, threatening to sue Kraus.) The result, Chris opines in the novel, is “pages of unreadable correspondence”. But as a work of fiction, it’s several hundred pages of exuberant, delirious brilliance.
A keen sense of irony inhabits Kraus’ work.Credit: Alamy Stock Photo
Recalling those critics who decried Garner’s Monkey Grip as a “private journal”, one ArtForum critic accused I Love Dick of being “not so much written as secreted”. To date, all Kraus’ novels include or refer to avatars of herself and Sylvère Lotringer, founder of the seminal independent publisher Semiotext(e), who was Kraus’ husband from 1988 until their 2005 separation. Kraus still co-runs Semiotext(e) alongside Moroccan-born, Los Angeles-based writer Hedi El Kholti. The Four Spent the Day Together is the first novel she has ever published outside it.
Having completed the book, Kraus says, she even began reading Garner: Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach, the diaries. (She especially loves Monkey Grip: “There’s just so much avidity and lust for life in that book.”)
Kraus began her career in journalism as a teenager in New Zealand. Like Garner, she not only keeps a diary, but incorporates journalistic techniques in her work. The conclusion of her new novel, focused on three teenagers who shoot and kill an older acquaintance, “was based on a real crime”.
“But I wasn’t going to write the story of that crime. I wasn’t going to do the things that a nonfiction book would commit to doing. Crime was just a way of entering the community. It’s the wedge that stops time, that lets you take the cover off things and start looking at what the whole set-up is.
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“Actually,” she adds, “the police gave me this trove of gems from the kids’ social media. They were texting each other throughout the crime. Their DMs showed how they would talk to each other. It wasn’t how they would talk to me. That gave me so much insight. I mean, that’s the interior monologue.”
Whether it’s I Love Dick’s yearning portrait of self-transformation, the fraught online relationship in 2000’s Aliens & Anorexia, or a couple’s quest to adopt a child while travelling through Romania, miniature dachshund in tow, in 2006’s dazzling portrait of marital breakdown, Torpor, a keen sense of irony inhabits Kraus’ work.
In the new novel, Catt’s father engages in disconcerting flirtations with her, paralleling an art magazine co-publisher who gets too close to his female colleagues and faces a sexual harassment lawsuit; art school students bully Catt as Trump declares a new tolerance for belligerence and bellicosity; Catt’s partner, Paul Garcia, a recovering alcoholic, entertains guests during dinner parties by discussing determinism – all while getting blind drunk. Exposing life’s paradoxes and follies? Consider it a Kraus speciality.
Since her first three books comprise an informal trilogy and two of Summer of Hate’s characters, Catt and Paul, return in her new novel, could The Four Spent the Day Together, I wonder, also form part of a trilogy?
“The first three novels all concerned my life with Sylvère. That was really the focus. I very deliberately left Summer of Hate open to a sequel at the end. I was really thinking that, when I figured out the last page. So there could well be a third book. Or a fourth, who knows?” she says with a laugh. “Maybe a whole new series!”
The Four Spent the Day Together (Scribe) is out September 30.
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