It’s a bit difficult to explain why I found Chris Kraus’s latest novel such a riveting read. On the surface it sounds like a bit of a hard sell.
To start with, is it really a novel? That’s how it’s described on the cover, but it’s certainly not a conventional example. The main character, Catt Greene, serves mainly as a transparent mask for the author, a renowned experimentalist known principally for her tricks with literary form.
It’s divided into three parts. The first is a description of the protagonist’s grim childhood in Milford, Connecticut. The second, set in Balsam, Minnesota, gives an account of her disintegrating marriage to an alcoholic.
The third is her attempt to recreate the sordid real-life murder of a young man by two friends of a young woman from whom he attempted to buy sex.
Each of these sections, melodramatic though they may sound, is described in the deadpan, unheightened language that has distinguished Kraus’s writing from the very first, her breakthrough novel I Love Dick.
“Well-meaning friends suggested she try writing short stories but she could not grasp the form or the point. She’d never studied creative writing, joined a group or even taken a workshop. To her, writing was research. She had no writing practice. The only way she could do it was by default – the times when she was possessed by an idea too large and upsetting to formulate.
“To her writing was research.” It’s certainly possible to over-research a topic, to build up such a body of detailed information that the narrative is entirely submerged. And the first few pages of this book, with their plethora of family relationships and backstories, threaten to do just that.
Kraus’s essential sanity and instinct for a good story begin gradually to prevail, though, until every tiny detail of the class-ridden hellhole that was her New England childhood becomes unadornedly real to the reader.
This first part, “Milford”, ends abruptly with the family’s departure for New Zealand – a story already told (in part) 30 years ago in I Love Dick.
Instead we move on in Catt/Chris’s life. She’s now an established critic and writer but has recently had a number of travails with both real estate and relationships, as spelt out in her 2012 book Summer of Hate.
The second part, “Balsam”, is a nightmarish account of her attempts to maintain her marriage in the midst of much personal turmoil, including an intense campaign to cancel her by a squad of malcontents who see her as more of a property owner than an artist: “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 Twitterisation of everything, she’d started to wonder if there was even a point in writing books any more.”
This “what’s the point” feeling leads to an attempt to go outside her own life and try instead to enter the lives of others she doesn’t know at all, the kids who committed the pointless murder which gives this book its overall title.
Part 3, “Harding” – subtitled “The Four Spent the Day Together” – is an attempt to resuscitate the New Journalistic techniques of Truman Capote’s famous “non-fiction novel” In Cold Blood.
The subtitle of Capote’s book was “A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences”. That word “true” has given rise to a lot of controversy.
What is truth, especially in the context of an event that can only actually be reconstructed from the self-serving memories of those who were present, in this case, the two murderers?
By the standards of the great American journalistic tradition represented by oral historians such as Studs Terkel and Robert Caro, Catt is a poor researcher. And yet she does everything she can think of to gather information about the four people at the heart of the murder.
She tries to talk to their friends – until her head researcher tells her that she’s been told she may herself be killed if she keeps on enquiring into the local drug scene.
She tries to talk to the police – but given the case is still sub judice they can’t really share any details with her.
Finally she’s presented with a transcript of some texts sent between the four of them on the fateful day, and that’s how the book ends: with the horrifyingly empty chatter of young people toying with someone else’s life more out of boredom than genuine rage.
It was always a bit hard to credit – even with his vaunted years of research and involvement in the whole community – that Capote could really have known what went down at those murders. Chris Kraus’s painful, angular honesty blows that whole set of conventions out of the water. She doesn’t know, nor can she really imagine it. But that’s after much trying.
This fine book, a jewel in the crown of Kraus’s work to date, is honest in its constant admissions of failure. She can’t recreate the event she set out to try to understand. But she shows in the process how much better it is to say so than to fudge some facile copy and peddle it as the truth.
The Four Spent The Day Together, by Chris Kraus (Scribe, $40), is out now.
