Chris Kraus and the Art of the Landlord |
Every so often, a person on the internet discovers that Chris Kraus is a landlord. They post through their shock: How could the iconic anti-establishment author of I Love Dick, the underdog doyenne of American autofiction, collect a check from the very same scrappy have-nots she portrays in her novels?
You might find from social media that Chris Kraus is a landlord, but you could also learn it from any of her books, or from many interviews with her. Her fictional avatar (Chris, Sylvie, Catt) is often a property manager as well as a writer, filmmaker, and/or art critic. Her five novels—I Love Dick, Aliens & Anorexia, Torpor, Summer of Hate, and now The Four Spent the Day Together—play fast and loose with autobiography, critical theory, art criticism, high and low culture, and, frankly, geopolitical circumstances. You could describe them as road novels, and not just because Kraus’s avatar is frequently driving cross-country or cross-continent—she wants to map how we connect, usually across class and gender.
It was 1997’s I Love Dick that eventually brought her mainstream success; one could trace the recent vogue for the unhinged female protagonist to the novel’s raw, thirsty, anxious, angry antiheroine. In I Love Dick, which is about stalking and writing letters to and making feminist art about cultural critic Dick Hebdige (the titular Dick), Chris asks, “If women have failed to make ‘universal’ art because we’re trapped within the ‘personal,’ why not universalize the ‘personal’ and make it the subject of our art?”
Exposing oneself by making art of one’s life, exposing others by barely concealing their identities—Kraus’s novels are also about privacy and ownership. Yes, these are feminist issues, and they are also class issues. She makes art of her life, and she funds her life by owning property. Forget about separating the art from the artist—the question here is separating art from capital. Property management is her day job: “Until the last couple of years, there was no way I could support myself with part-time teaching and writing,” she said in a 2017 interview. And indeed, her latest novel, The Four Spent the Day Together, revolves around real estate and all its effects and affects: apartments, summer homes, commuting, school districts, cities, suburbs, escape, hope, potential, disappointment, despair, and endless repair without redemption.
The importance of having the ability to move is not lost on Catt, the central character in The Four Spent the Day Together. The novel opens in Milford, Connecticut. Catt is five years old, and she and her family are recent transplants from the East Bronx. A “long metal fence” separates the private beach for residents of the affluent side of town from the rest of Milford, namely Wildemere Avenue, where Catt’s family lives. The third-person narration zooms out to survey the neighborhood’s fortunes over time: summer shacks and bungalows that get storm windows when sold to the year-round families who find work on the assembly line in munitions factories in nearby Bridgeport.
The family has moved here for the promise of a better life. The beginning of the novel focuses on Catt’s mother, Emma, who thinks that the Bronx “was........