Why This Famed Art Writer Turned to True Crime

Chris Kraus is one of the most well-known contemporary art writers. She is also an important taste-maker, co-editor of independent publisher Semiotext(e), which played a key role in introducing French theory to U.S. audiences.

But Kraus is probably best known today as a novelist. Her 1997 autobiographical novel I Love Dick became a buzzy literary reference in the 2010s, and a model for autofiction. It was even made into an Amazon show.

This fall, Kraus put out a new novel, titled The Four Spent the Day Together. It has a cryptic three-part structure that I think I should set up.

The first part focuses on a young woman named Catt Greene. Drawing heavily on Kraus’s own life, it describes a childhood growing up in Connecticut, being bullied, and dreaming of leaving the hardships of her depressing lower-class life behind through experiments with drugs and sex, activism and art.

The second part focuses on Catt many decades later, now an art critic and novelist who has found unexpected success with a novel called I Love Dick, which is being made into an Amazon show. But it also focuses on the character of Paul, Catt’s husband, an addiction councilor who struggles with addiction himself, which slowly tears the two apart.

Like the real-life Kraus, the character Catt Greene owns properties in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which she rents out. Like Kraus, Greene is attacked by online critics in the late 2010s for being a landlord.

This leads to Part 3 of the book. Feeling demonized, and that her own life is running out of raw material to turn into literature, Catt Greene finds herself drawn to investigating a real-life murder in bleak rural Minnesota. The character of Catt Greene, and Kraus through her, attempt to reconstruct the grisly facts of the case, and try to make sense of it.

That’s probably enough set-up. Chris Kraus joins national critic Ben Davis to talk about her writing, her life, and her new book.