ELISSA NADWORNY, HOST:
A change of location can offer a new chapter or the illusion of one. In the new novel "The Four Spent The Day Together" by Chris Kraus, we meet the main character, Catt Greene, as a child who's moved to a small Connecticut town, then again when she's an adult on the Minnesota Iron Range. And finally, when she meets other people from that area, whose lives are more precarious than her own. Addiction, art and social class are all explored in this work of autofiction - part autobiography, part crime thriller. You may know her from her book "I Love Dick" or the TV show based on it. Chris Kraus joins us now. Welcome.
CHRIS KRAUS: Thank you.
NADWORNY: So your stories contain a lot of true personal elements. So let's start with the protagonist, Catt Greene. How much of her is you?
KRAUS: Well, she's my avatar.
NADWORNY: (Laughter).
KRAUS: Catt Greene is me at the moment of the story.
NADWORNY: Does it happen in real time, or did you go in having a specific story to kind of dig up from your past?
KRAUS: Well, when I decided to write the novel, initially I thought I was going to just write about the crime. That was my first project - to write a true crime book about the incident on the Nagano trail on the Iron Range. But as I researched it - and I spent about 2 1/2 years researching it. Really, at the beginning of the research process I realized two things - first, that I wasn't going to get enough interior material from all of the people involved to make the novel that I would ideally want to write. And second, I just sort of stumbled and started tripping back on my own past because the town of Harding felt so similar. I felt this powerful deja vu to the little blue-collar town in Connecticut that my family had lived in while I was growing up.
NADWORNY: Wow. Let's talk about place. The book is told in those three sections. In each new location, there's kind of this hope that the change of location is going to make life better. Can you talk a little bit about that illusion or desire?
KRAUS: On the Iron Range, researching the case, I talked to hundreds of people, probably more, and a phrase that came up over and over was, I moved here to make a fresh start. Over and over, people are making these fresh starts, and so I very consciously used that phrase multiple times in the book. There's something so poignant about it. It's so ill-fated from the start. But in the first part of the book - Part 1 - it's about the lives of Catt's parents in the 1940s and '50s. They move from the Bronx to Connecticut. There's this idea that it's going to be this huge improvement, this huge change of life, and just by saying, Connecticut, they're going to - you know, it has this magical cachet that's going to be so elevating and life-changing.
And, of course, it wasn't at all. The commute was 4 1/2 hours for Jasper, the father. And Emma, the mother, who's really only ever known the Bronx, found it so incredibly lonely and alienating to be in a small, white, working-class town where everybody went to grade school together and they have no desire to make any new friends.
NADWORNY: Part 3 is mostly about a murder that takes place on the Iron Range. And you take the title from what I presume is the real news item on it - "The Four Spent The Day Together"?
KRAUS: The case was very well covered in the local newspapers. And it was in the reportage, I think, from Duluth that I saw the phrase, the four spent the day together, as a way of recapping the events of the kidnapping and murder. And that struck me as so quaint. I'd grown up partly in New Zealand. My parents emigrated to New Zealand. And it seemed like a kind of phrase that I would have heard in New Zealand at the time of growing up. I mean, sort of a little kind of anachronistic, British, almost 19th century - the four spent the day together, which is a very bizarre way to describe a kidnapping that takes place on methamphetamine.
NADWORNY: Does that mean that there is kind of, like, duality in life, that there's harmony with tragedy, that there's, like, ordinary with extraordinary? Like, what does that say to you? What does that raise for you?
KRAUS: Well, I just thought it was a very funny turn of phrase. And it was the day, rather than the murder, that initially interested me in the crime. You know, there were a lot of murders up there. If it had just been, bang, bang, you're dead, in the living room or on the sidewalk, wouldn't have interested me so much. But the idea, the durational nature of it and wondering what went on for the 16 or 18 hours that these people spent together, that was the mystery that I wanted to solve. And that wasn't a mystery that interested the police very much. I mean, of course they're looking for a conviction. The police are working for the prosecution, and the prosecution are seeking a conviction. So they're only looking for the incidents, the material, the phrases that can lead to the conviction. I'm looking for everything else.
NADWORNY: (Laughter).
KRAUS: You know, everything ambient, everything that kind of captures what the relationships were, what the vibe was between the kids, how the tempo of the day shifted - that was what I was interested in.
NADWORNY: Yeah. Did you find the answers that you were looking for by writing this book?
KRAUS: No. Nobody has the answers. I mean, the big question is how did the murder change from a sort of mad idea that you have while you're high to a fait accompli over the course of the kidnapping? And there's no answer for that - couldn't really locate it. There were multiple times when the victim could have left, but he didn't. They were all getting high together at multiple times, in multiple locations. So I mean, the conclusion is really that it was - just became like a shared hallucination. And I think that's a very adolescent thing.
I remember that from my own adolescence. I mean, maybe not to this degree and maybe not on as extreme drugs. Everything now is more brutal, more extreme. Everything is amplified. But the giddiness and the complicity and the collusion of being in this bubble of a little group, and you're doing everything together, and you're kind of creating a group mind together, and it feels absolutely omnipotent.
But the answer as to why did this happen, I don't see an answer for that. The guy who owned the rental property that the murder took place in, he deals a lot with these kids because he rents to them. And at one point, we're talking, and he said, the difference now is there's this depravity at the heart of everything, and I don't know where it comes from. I can't locate it, and I don't know how to stop it. So to me, that's the biggest unanswerable question.
NADWORNY: Well, Chris Kraus, thank you so much for speaking with us.
KRAUS: Well, thank you so much. It was a pleasure.
NADWORNY: Chris Kraus' new novel is "The Four Spent The Day Together."
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