A true crime book sent me down a rabbit hole of court filings and meth-fueled murders on Minnesota’s Iron Range
The Four Spent the Day Together | Chris Kraus | Scribner (320 pages)
I didn’t mean to fall down a rabbit hole. But then again, no one ever does.
I picked up Chris Kraus’s new novel, The Four Spent the Day Together — a title that refers to four troubled teenagers involved in a local Iron Range murder case, including the victim — thinking I’d get a sharp, literary take on a brutal Iron Range murder.
Kraus is best known for her groundbreaking I Love Dick, a seminal feminist text that The Guardian called a “cult feminist classic,” and the Amazon Prime adaptation of it; I expected her signature fearless intimacy and boundary-pushing narrative, just with a new, grittier subject.
And, indeed, what I got, particularly in the third section of the book — the true crime part — was sprawling, impressionistic, and nearly impossible to track. Every victim, every defendant, every bystander gets a name. She braids together meth, setting a corpse on fire, sexual assault (alleged), and, for good measure, decapitation.
I had flashbacks to taking a reader’s comprehension test.
This is not a straight narrative, but something stranger, murkier and more disorienting. By the time I finished, I wasn’t just reading the book. I was scribbling names, opening court filings, Googling lawyers, checking Minnesota prisoner databases, and, pathetically, even subscribing to the Bemidji Pioneer just to track down old coverage. (Note to self: remember to cancel.)
There was absolutely no reason for me to do this. No editor was waiting for copy. I wasn’t filing an appellate brief (though, trust me, I had a few ideas). And yet there I was, surrounded by tabs and PDFs like a detective with a cork board and red string.
Autofiction is the term often applied to Kraus’s work, a hybrid of autobiography and fiction where writers openly fold their own lives into their novels, though she’s on record as not being a fan of the label. But somewhere along the line, in her fictional quest for answers, she drafted me into her case file. What really happened? And, of course, as with any senseless crime, it still doesn’t make sense.
From Marfa to the Mesabi Trail
l Love Dick was famously set in the rarefied art mecca of Marfa, Texas. The Four Spent the Day Together takes a profoundly different turn, set in Minnesota’s Iron Range , weaving together violence with a backdrop of poverty, addiction, decay and class dislocation. It’s a book about roots, trauma, and the fraught relationship between writer and subject. It’s an ambitious undertaking that refuses to call it in.
The novel is in three parts. The first, a beautifully and more traditionally written coming-of-age story, centers on Catt Greene (Kraus’s avatar). Here, Kraus grounds the narrative in place and class, painting a vivid picture of growing up in a blue-collar town in Connecticut. I came for the crime but found myself unexpectedly held by this quieter, cohesive storytelling. It’s like seeing a traditional, representational landscape painted by an artist known for abstraction. Think of it this way: Mark Rothko could paint a figure; he chose to do color fields. Kraus demonstrates she can do the clear, linear narrative, but she chooses otherwise later in the book.
The second part turns more inward, exploring the writer’s life as Catt splits time between Los Angeles and the Iron Range. The narrative becomes more fractured. Her husband is a recovering and sometimes lapsing addict; she is trying to untangle what was happening in their marriage and fending off an online mob labeling her a gentrifying landlord. Who wouldn’t reach for the nearest all-encompassing murder to investigate as an escape?
The third act is where the book leans fully into the true-crime element, and it is here that the jarring beauty of Kraus’s prose collides with horrific subject matter. The shift in tone is powerful, as when Catt describes the winter landscape:
Driving north on Route 38 out of Greatwoods, they followed a map onto snowy back roads and eventually pulled into a small parking area. There were just a few other cars. But behind a big metal gate they found a nicely groomed wilderness trail that ran for six miles through a handful of lakes and the woods to an abandoned estate. They put on their skis and took off over a series of up-and-down hills that passed by two lakes. It was around 1 p.m., the heat of the day, about 10 degrees Fahrenheit. Ice-coated branches of larch, maple, and oak laced high overhead, and through them, the sky. Catt zoomed down the hills, ecstatic.
It’s this lyrical writing, set against the grim reality of addiction, poverty and teenage murder on the Mesabi Trail, that makes the emotional experience of the book so demanding.
Where Is My Neat Little Whodunit?
The true crime genre is a juggernaut. Podcasts regularly top the charts, and it commands the kind of loyalty usually reserved for sports franchises or Marvel movies. We’re told (okay, I searched on line) psychologists call the appeal “threat management” — rehearsing danger safely. I think of it more simply: when life feels messy, someone else’s messy life is easier to organize than your own. The appeal is in the puzzle-solving, the satisfaction of ordering chaos into a neat whodunit, or, in the case of the northern Minnesota murders, a clear why-dunit.
But when Kraus writes about the gruesome details in the final third of her book, she doesn’t give us the clarity that true-crime addicts crave. She gives us fragments. So many names . This refusal to isolate one “whodunit” forces the reader to confront the bigger, messier picture: the systemic decay of the community. Crimes are spliced together like a podcast edited with a blender.
Maybe that is the point. But as a reader, I kept holding out hope for a little more string for my bulletin board.
The Four Spent the Day Together is shelved in the fiction section of the bookstore, not in true crime. Kraus has license to blur. And perhaps her approach is the most accurate: the truth of crime is never neat, never complete. Maybe the emotional truth resides in the disorientation itself. is this a repeat with end??
Capote Called; He Wants His Ethical Dilemma Back
The project is ambitious enough to draw comparisons to works like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Capote called his work a “nonfiction novel,” while insisting every line was pure fact. Not everyone was happy with this novelization of crime, and not everyone was convinced by Capote’s declaration that his book was strictly factual.
In a recent interview with Jennifer Wilson (“Chris Kraus Reinvents the True-Crime Novel”), Kraus said she reread Capote’s masterpiece as well as Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song while researching. She is quoted as saying that “it was not possible to write that kind of book anymore” in our viral world of litigation and permanent digital footprints. She also emphasizes that the Iron Range crimes she encountered often read less like psychologically motivated murder plots than like the chaotic devastation of meth on communities.
The destruction of meth comes through loud and clear. And, to her credit, Krau she does not give into the temptation of inventing plausible motivations or connecting convenient dots. What she has instead is obsession, proximity and a brave willingness to use her own life as scaffolding.
Must We Be Comforted? (A Reviewer Asks)
Despite my moments of curmudgeonly impatience with the crime section, I came to accept a book on the writer’s terms. The book succeeds in giving us what it feels like to be lost inside a tragedy you can’t map. The disjointedness itself becomes a kind of truth — not about the murder, but about our overwhelming, human desire to impose narrative on chaos.
Kraus refused to be comforting. And maybe that’s the final, crucial honesty. The courts don’t resolve neatly. Trauma doesn’t narrate cleanly. Justice doesn’t always tie itself with red string on a cork board. Seriously, though, I’m still tempted to check if the Duluth News Tribune reviewed the book — and maybe call that lawyer.
Fine Print: Thanks to Scribner and NetGalley for the ARC.