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 an enormous dormitory for immigrant labor built in the late nineteenth century” where “each new wave of workers was a little more desperate.” Alienated from, but not exactly resentful of, her new Puerto Rican neighbors, Emma is relieved to start afresh in a new place. Her focus is Catt’s younger sister, Carla, or rather her sense that something may be different about Carla, who never smiles and constantly wails. While her husband, Jasper, finds challenging books for Catt, Emma takes Carla for doctors’ visits and tests. When Carla is diagnosed with an intellectual disability, Jasper and Emma refuse to believe the limitations the doctor sets for her, just as they refused to accept the limitations of the Bronx.

Mobility is the defining trait of the characters in the novel, the fortune that separates the stuck from the spiraling. But now, in Milford, Emma is lonelier than ever. She collects stamps she can redeem for products at the IGA and is shunned by the other moms when she doesn’t realize she must bring a gift when dropping off Catt at a child’s birthday party. They take out a second mortgage to send Carla to a special-needs program; 18 months later, she starts speaking in whole sentences.

But this is where the narration shifts its focus to Catt, who “couldn’t stand to look at Carla.” She is slighted by the kids in town who call Carla names, and she takes refuge in her father, who lavishes his attention on her (not so much on his wife or other daughter). From here, the narrative mostly sticks to Catt’s lows at school, where she is bullied and shunned. Her teen years are filled with the requisite peeks into sex, drugs, social justice, and hitchhiking. And then Jasper, who has all along been suffering professional disappointment, decides to move the family to Wellington, New Zealand. 

Kraus’s third person provides enough distance between author and protagonist to allow a reader to forget, if they happened to already know, that she, too, was born in the Bronx, moved to Connecticut as a child, and went to high school in Wellington. But once the novel’s second section picks up, we are squarely back in the Chris Kraus autofictional universe. It’s 2012, and Catt dreams of owning a summer house in Balsam, Minnesota, “an old-fashioned cottage, one and a half stories tall, perfectly located,” where she can work on her unfinished novel. She’s already renting a lake house in the area with her partner, Paul Garcia, who completed his master’s in addiction studies nearby.

This section travels back and forth from Minnesota to Los Angeles, Catt and Paul’s primary residence, to Albuquerque, where they own properties. Catt is struggling to make sense of her own place in society. Her old work is getting rediscovered by the Tumblr generation, an online enthusiasm she benefits from but fundamentally mistrusts. Her success seems tenuous to her, since the world she lives in is simultaneously getting fixed up and hollowed out: “the dive bars and hole-in-the-wall galleries where they used to present work to a handful of friends were being replaced by sumptuous, quietly capitalized spaces. There were conferences, seminars, launches, and openings, all of them well-received and then quickly forgotten by larger, more affluent audiences.”

Los Angeles is becoming too expensive, but she doesn’t want to leave behind the house she loves, which the narrator describes as “hidden behind a wrought-iron gate … one of the jewels of the ungentrified, crime-and-gang-ridden neighborhood that Catt loved and Paul hated.” Catt finds romance in living in a predominantly Central American neighborhood; it reminds her of her Bronx childhood. Paul, however, sees the cracks into which he could slip. He had two years of sobriety when he met Catt, and “before that, his life was a mash-up of alcoholic catastrophes.” The way forward, it seems, is real estate: “Recently it had occurred to them both that buying a house two thousand miles from LA in the Northwoods might be the answer.” The implied question: How is it possible for anyone but the wealthy to afford to live in this world?

Kraus doesn’t attempt an answer. Her project, here and in her other novels, is to catalog a range of personal indignities and social injustices and to juxtapose them in the same novel without evaluating who has it worse. What’s curious about her work is how real estate acts as a place of encounter between people having very difficult struggles. The Four Spent the Day Together reevaluates a remark she made in an interview with Sheila Heti in 2013: “buying and fixing, and then renting and managing, was a way of engaging with a population completely outside the culture industry.” Indeed, Paul and Catt met when he applied for a job as a resident manager of some of her apartments in Albuquerque, a town that, the narrator remarks, “as everyone knew, was split sharply between Good and Bad.”

As Catt achieves more recognition for her work as a writer, she objects to the online haters who view her primarily as a property owner. In The Four Spent the Day Together, Catt is, like Kraus, the author of Summer of Hate, I Love Dick (which is similarly turned into a television show), and a biography of Kathy Acker. Catt is also, like Kraus, repeatedly targeted for online and eventual IRL cancellation for various reasons: property ownership; refusing to cancel an event with another writer at a new Boyle Heights arts venue being boycotted by anti-gentrification activists; defending a #MeToo’d professor.

“Catt’s novels had always evolved from her life, but now her life seemed redundant to the grotesque image of her as a landlord,” Kraus rues. Even if Kraus’s novels are invested in dissonance and juxtaposition, Catt, as a character, has a harder time owning her own contradictions than she does owning rental apartments. Catt admits that she “struggled to understand where her critics were coming from. Were they opposed to all rental housing? Should it be run by the state? Did they believe that the buildings maintained themselves?” Catt is sharply attuned to the hypocrisies of others. She describes the Boyle Heights Guardians, a group that calls for a boycott of businesses they deem complicit in the gentrification of the working-class Latine neighborhood, as “comprised largely of ­CalArts students and recent grads” who don’t all even live in Boyle Heights—though how does she know their membership details? She is genuinely surprised that anyone she takes seriously would join up with the group and is hurt when she is met with protesters at a CUNY event.

Catt (and Kraus, as she’s argued elsewhere) is absolutely right, however, that if we’re really going to talk about how artists support themselves, then there’s a long list of trust-fundees and nepo-gallerinos who deserve a stronger side-eye. As for literature, there’s no shortage of beige furniture fiction about who gets the summer home in the divorce. Even edgier books that are buoyed by homeownership aren’t really talked about this way. All Fours, 2024’s feminist bestseller, was also about real estate: It begins with a speculator taking covert pictures of the narrator’s property. Would Miranda July’s perimenopausal revelations have been possible if she and Mike Mills couldn’t afford two homes?

In Kraus’s novels, any one human life matters immensely, but the trick is seeing how much it matters lined up against a rather more dramatic case. The novel’s third and final section is such a hard pivot away from academic and art world gripes as to make them seem meaningless: a retelling of a brutal murder on the fringe of the “meth community” of the Iron Range, northern Minnesota, not far from Catt and Paul’s summer home. Three teenagers shoot and kill a slightly older new acquaintance after spending the day with him (hence the title of the book). The narrator tells the unlucky backstory of each of the four and recounts the circumstances of the day that leads to the murder, the quick apprehension of the suspects, and their trial.

Catt researches the case and tries to get information out of the locals, and the narrative disintegrates into a log of the texts between the murderers during the crime. Though she hopes to write an In Cold Blood–style true-crime novel, full of dark interiority and desperate motivation, she realizes that the crime, committed by people on meth looking for more meth, was ultimately irrational and empty. This is a familiar realization for anyone close to someone in a downward spiral of addiction: The “why” simply does not satisfy. Nevertheless, the novel is driven by an urge to understand: “She thought about the distances between LA and the gray house in Balsam and the lives of these four young people on the Iron Range and decided she would try to bridge them.”

The most compelling parts of the novel pull off acts of bridging. Paul dreads and then quits his job doing mobile mental health triage on Skid Row in L.A., even though Catt “and her friends thought this was an important, even glamorous job. Of course: they did not have to do it.” When Paul starts to drink again to deal with his social phobia, Catt sympathizes with his discomfort around her milieu, because she had once shared it. In previous novels that center around marriage, it was the Kraus character who felt like the alienated spouse, the one no one talked to.

The Four Spent the Day Together also acknowledges the limits of connection. “Her dream of rehabbing the buildings in Albuquerque,” Catt acknowledges, “began not just as a means of supporting herself but as a small social project.” Rehab is a loaded word: For Catt, it’s an innocuous synonym for renovation; for Paul, it’s about recovery. It is agonizing to read Paul’s struggle to find and keep work in addiction services, because he needs help himself, and as those pages add up, they evince a sense of care—someone is noticing, someone is remembering his every misstep, even if, as Paul complains, “Catt was his lifeline, but she was almost always away.”

When there is trouble with the apartments in Albuquerque, the same disconnect emerges. Catt laments at length getting ripped off by the people she pays to manage the properties and the people renting from her. Catt and Paul have been gouged by management companies, so they hire a couple to work for them:

Patrizia was really Patricia, a white working-class wannabe chola, and Sammy, part of a large Gallup Navajo family, had spent numerous years in prison for petty drug-and-alcohol related offenses before getting clean. In a sense, they were Paul and Catt’s lower-class doppelgängers and for this reason, Catt felt compelled to help them: loaning them money, paying for work on Sammy’s old Chevy Blazer, buying them plane tickets so they could connect with long-lost relations.

But Sammy and Patrizia’s friends and family move into the buildings, stop paying rent, and damage the property—so that Patrizia has to ask for money for repairs. Ineptitude or scam? Making a living in real estate isn’t easy: Small-time landlords are constantly hustling, flipping, scheming, and dodging the capital gains tax. The choice is between profit, or human connection. There’s no moment of breakthrough between Catt and her “lower-class doppelgängers.”

Catt doesn’t quite fit, in the neighborhood or in the professional sphere. “She felt estranged from the people she knew in the art world as well, people who’d always been rich or felt underprivileged if their parents were merely professors or lawyers.” The thing about “outsider status” is that the vast majority of people feel that they’re kept out of some inner circle, even those in the center rings. At its best, a Chris Kraus novel understands the futility of knowing that someone has it better or worse than you do. The ghastly details of the true-crime section may seem a far cry from the rest of the novel, though they strike an appropriately jarring note. Though there are no conclusions by the end of the novel, there are confluences. The Iron Ridge story boils down to meth, and in the end, Catt finds Paul “smoking meth and crack” and divorces him. What’s compelling about The Four Spent the Day Together is not a false comparison between haves and have-nots, but the dissonance, the stark juxtapositions, and the inconclusive conclusions that result when you try to make sense of cruelty.