The four spent the day together by Chris Kraus

Don’t pick this up expecting to read the usual crime thriller, despite the blurb on the back cover. Although the latter part of the novel examines a true crime case, there are no easy answers. The murderers are three teenagers mindlessly spending the day passing time with their victim. If there is a real villain in this story it is addiction. The four all drop in and out of methamphetamine highs and at the end of it all there is a dead body.

Catt, an author and critic, is the central character. She is an avatar for Chris Kraus herself, and the first two sections of the book are largely autobiographical, recounting her childhood in an aspirational middleclass family with much focus on her developmentally delayed sister Carla, and then her adult life partnered to a repeatedly relapsing alcoholic. Catt herself was a bit of a wild child, taking risks and experimenting with alcohol and drugs. But she comes through that stage of life and emerges as a successful writer giving presentations around the country. The question is, how is it that she survived that risky teenage period, but others don’t? And what can be done to help those young people?

If anyone should have answers, you might think it would be Catt’s husband Paul, a youth counsellor. But he suffers himself with alcohol addiction, and despite good intentions and numerous ‘fresh starts’, he finds himself constantly returning to the bottle. As a counsellor seeing the wave of teenage meth addiction, he wonders if there is anything that actually works for the kids he is supposed to be helping.

The novel as a whole is told in a detached kind of way, placing events in the context of social changes and Trump campaigns, a narration without explanations of emotions, motives and actions. The reader is given insight into daily lives, and social media interactions, but there are no simple explanations. It is a tangle of moments, people drifting in their lives, with decisions that go nowhere. I’m reminded of Diana Reid’s Signs of damage, a refutation of the idea that you can comfortably explain current behaviour by examination of past trauma. Kraus’s latest book raises more questions than it answers, and will leave you pondering the issues long afterwards. This book would be of interest to readers interested in psychology and social issues.

Themes: Addiction, Social media, Delinquency, Alcoholism, Poverty.

Helen Eddy