The Four Spent the Day Together by Chris Kraus Review by Myka Tucker-Abramson

The Four Spent the Day Together by Chris Kraus

Review by Myka Tucker-Abramson

Publisher: Scribner

Publication date: 2025

ISBN: 1668098687

Pages: 324

Known for her stylish, autofiction novels that are equal parts theory and literature, Chris Kraus is also one of contemporary literature’s great geographers. The central concern of her oeuvre, stretching from I Love Dick (1999), to Torpor (2004), to Summer of Hate (2012) is how to make sense of capitalism’s ever-changing and highly uneven topographies. How to connect the heady art world of LA, with the gentrification of New York and the gruesome US-backed civil wars in Guatemala? How to connect the deindustrialised wastelands of upstate New York with the gentrification of Berlin, the first Gulf War, and economic and social catastrophe that followed the rapacious theft of the former socialist world’s resources? How to link the War on Terror, the expansion of the ‘golden gulag,’ the militarisation of the US-Mexico border, and the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis? 

Kraus addresses these questions through an unusual cartographic method: she follows the deliberately uncomfortable attempts of her alter-ego protagonists (Chris, Sylvie, Catt Dunlop, Catt Greene) to establish cross-class personal relationships. Kraus’ use of the cross-class encounter is both an aesthetic strategy and a lifestyle choice.  Kraus is also a landlord, a choice she once justified as a good alternative to working and “a way of engaging with a population completely outside the culture industry. Kind of like in gay culture, where hookups are a way of escaping your class.”

What made Kraus’ novels more progressive than her lifestyle choices was two-fold. First was the ironic distance that is a feature of her work. While Kraus deliberately blurred the line between autobiography and fiction, her landlord-artist protagonists were always a foil, a figure that provided a certain, yet limited glimpse of the American empire. “All politics,” Fredric Jameson wrote “is about real estate […] a matter of land grabs, on a local as well as a global scale.” And Kraus brilliantly transformed her own structural position as a property owner, landlord and member of an elite, financialised art world into both a vantage point and a node in the system her novels mapped. Equally important was Kraus’ surprisingly stubborn attachment to that which autofiction and autotheory largely erased: collective class struggle. In Kraus’ novels, historical strikes (e.g. the 1983-4 Morenci Miners’ Strike, the 1985 Coca Cola plant strike in Guatemala) were both important plot points and constitutive of the novels themselves, providing an alternative perspective to the privatised vision of the landlord-protagonist. 

Published over a decade after Summer of Hate, Kraus’ latest novel The Four Spent the Day Together appears to continue this project by turning to our contemporary era of declining US hegemony: the ascendancy of Trump, intensifying deindustrialisation and hinterlandization, a nationwide meth crisis, and Twitter (now X) and Tik Tok’s transformation of the media and political landscape. 

The Four is divided into three sections, each named for the section’s peripheral setting (Milford, Connecticut; Balsam, Minnesota; Harding, Minnesota). Part 1 recounts, in an oddly conventional manner, Catt Greene’s unhappy suburban childhood. Part 2 follows Catt’s purchasing of property in the bucolic town of Balsam in Minnesota’s Iron Range and the dual crises of her partner’s drug and alcohol addiction and the social media furore against Catt’s landlordism. Part 3, “Harding: ‘The four Spent the Day Together’” narrates Catt’s investigation of a gruesome execution-style murder of Brandon Halboch carried out by three young people, Brittney, Evan, and Micah, in the economically and socially decimated nearby ex-mining town. As with her previous novels, the central question driving the novel is cartographic: what connects Catt’s life in “LA and Balsam and the lives of these four young people in the Iron Range hinterland”, and, implicitly, what does this tell us about contemporary America? 

The Iron Range offers an excellent perspective for such a mapping as its history tracks the arc of US hegemony from its apex to ongoing collapse. Its mines supplied the iron ore for the steel of American armaments and ships during World War II; and the death-knell of mining in the region was China’s post-2008 slowdown, which led to it selling its surplus iron ore cheap, making steel production in the US unprofitable. The Iron Ridge also encompasses the trajectory of US labour – its history of multiethnic labour radicalism, its corporatist turn during the post-war compromise, and the inability of corporatism to confront capital flight and national abandonment, which lead to the Ridge’s historically unprecedented flip to the Republicans in the most recent election. 

And yet, Kraus’ method falls apart here. Unlike her earlier novels, there is no serious attempt to link the meth crisis, the collapse of US hegemony, the financialization of the art world, the rise of Trump, and the moral panics of the social media age. American Empire is absent. The histories of labour radicalism are omitted. And Catt’s own structural position is largely effaced. Instead the novel focuses on drawing analogies between Catt and the Harding youth. 

Thus, the novel’s foregrounding of Catt’s damaged, working-class childhood finds its echo in the brutal poverty of “the four’s” upbringing; the drug abuse and social media use that play a key role in events leading up to the murder echo Paul’s drug use that eventually tears apart Catt’s family, and the social media pile-ons that lead to Catt’s being cancelled. 

Indeed, one of the more uncomfortable aspects of the book are the long passages about the series of events that brought Catt under fire: becoming a landlord, signing a letter of support for an academic accused of sexually harassing a student, refusing to participate in a cultural boycott called for by anti-gentrification activists. The following is indicative.

“Catt’s novels had always evolved from her life, but now her life seemed redundant to the grotesque image of her as a landlord. Since Trump’s election and the Twitterization of everything, she’d started to wonder if there was even a point to writing books anymore. And who for? The directionless cruelty of the Trump era tore the veil off social behavior and destroyed the illusion that any one human life mattered.” 

Where previously Kraus’ novels offered precise mappings of the global structures of class struggle that differentially shape the lives of her characters, here power is reduced to a diffuse, ambient, and “directionless cruelty” where everyone is equally a victim and a perpetrator. 

What made Kraus such an important novelist was her insistence that autofiction was never just about the individual psyche of the protagonist and the author, but rather a perspective, itself forged by neoliberal processes of subjectivation, onto a world scarred and bruised by the ongoing violences of capital accumulation: American-backed death squads in Latin America, gentrification and displacement, the destruction of trade union movements, the brutal primitive accumulation of the former socialist world, the sadistic sexualised violence of the global prison system, the War on Terror. While Kraus’ novels were emplotted through the privatised fixations of the boomer art star-academic-landlord, the horizon of her novels were always more critical, more expansive, more collective. But with the loss of both her critical distance and the collective horizon, we are left with nothing but another handwringing, middle-brow novel about sad property owners.

Chris Kraus is an award-winning artist, theorist, philosopher and novelist. She is the author of three previous novels, I Love Dick, Torpor, and Summer of Hate.

Myka Tucker-Abramson works at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Cartographies of Empire: the Road Novel and American Hegemony (Stanford UP, 2025)

26 August 2026