'Chris Kraus reinvents the true-crime novel' The New Yorker 'A writer whose antennae are
attuned to subtle connections and strange cross-currents' Colm Tóibín 'This is Chris Kraus's
masterpiece' Constance Debré An unforgettable new novel from the author of the modern classic
I Love Dick - a witty probing journey into a fractured America culminating in the
investigation of a teenage murder. 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 rundown town the three young people were quickly arrested and imprisoned. No
one knows why they did it. 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. Undergoing a period of personal turmoil moving between LA and Minnesota - between the
urban art world and the rural poverty of the icy 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 mystery surrounding the murder and to understand the teenagers' lives Catt also finds
herself travelling back through 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 histories of three generations of American
lives and the patterns that repeat over lifetimes and is piercing commentary on the pressures
of lives lived on the edge.
