The Four Spent the Day Together

By: Chris Kraus

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell

“Chris Kraus reinvents the true-crime novel.” —The New Yorker

“The intelligence and honesty and total originality of Chris Kraus make her work not just great but indispensable…I read everything Chris Kraus writes; she softens despair with her brightness, and with incredible humor, too.” —Rachel Kushner, author of Creation Lake

An unforgettable new novel from the “powerfully original” (Dwight Garner, The New York Times) author of the cult classic I Love Dick—a stark, witty journey into a fractured, violent America, culminating in the investigation of a teenage murder on Minnesota’s Iron Range.

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, depressed town, on the fringes of the so-called “meth community,” the three young people were quickly arrested and imprisoned.

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. Locked into a period of personal turmoil, moving between LA and Minnesota—between the art world and the urban poverty of Paul’s addiction therapist jobs, the rural poverty of the icy, depressed 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 brutality and despair surrounding the murder and to understand the teenagers’ lives, Catt is led back to 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 tensions of unclaimed futures and unchosen circumstances in the age of social media, paralyzing interconnectedness, and the ever-widening gulf between the rich and poor.

Addiction overload

The beginning was a real drag. Endless repetition of achoholic addition and relapses and enablement
Rest of book filled with losers and more addiction. Picking an area filled with drug addled youth and looking for a deeper context was a waste of time.
Problem clearly too widespread to solve and story lost any real interest as outcome was reveled early. Non of the perps the least bit interesting or sympathetic
Total waste of time.

Doesn't work well as an audiobook.

It doesn't work well as an audiobook because the story is fragmented between many characters and if your attention wanders, it is easy to get lost. It feels self indulgent and is boring most of the time.

I love reading Krauss

Did not expect it to be a "not all landlords" novel. It is a bit jumpy but trully Kraus wrotes so well, I glided through the book. Bless her passionate and inteligent heart.