The great post-dramatic novel of the United States of today

The entire first part of this novel is a false gateway: we read the story of a young couple who meet one day at church, get married, and go off to live in one of the idyllic suburbs where they will lead the life that every middle-class couple has dreamed of, with a little garden, children, and apple pies on Sunday afternoons. But this is a book by Chris Kraus (New York, 1955), one of the symbols of American counterculture, the author of I love Dick, a 1997 novel that is today considered one of the most important feminist novels, and therefore things cannot go on like this for long. There are signs for the attentive reader: the second daughter is born with a cognitive problem, the neighbors are more hostile than one would expect, and the father's jobs keep closing down. Suddenly, this grand overview focuses on a single character: Catherine, the eldest daughter, who will flee from this very uptight family as soon as she can. That is when the novel takes a leap, which will only be the first of many.

Rechristened as Catt and turned into a successful writer, a symbol, even an icon, we find her again in 2008 Los Angeles, in the midst of the global economic crisis. Social networks begin to take over the world with insatiable voracity, and when someone points out the successful writer as a landlord who lives off the exploitation of the vulnerable (she rents an apartment block to migrant families), the pyre begins to burn. Catt (or is it Chris Kraus herself? If you look for information, you will see that, following the success of the series adaptation of I Love Dick, she had similar problems) does not let herself be intimidated and, moreover, she has to deal with other things: a boyfriend who has many problems with alcohol, for example. The temporal and spatial comings and goings do not stop: as soon as we are in Los Angeles we are in Minnesota, at a university in Switzerland, in rehabilitation clinics, on streets full of the homeless, in 2003, in 2012, in 2015... just when an eccentric millionaire named Donald Trump begins to pull away in the polls as a candidate for the country's presidency.

Restlessness, hopelessness, and violence

At this point, it has been a while since the reading of the book became deeply uncomfortable, and this is precisely what Chris Kraus is seeking: to summon the chaos, the nonsense, and the loss of references and points of orientation that have devastated American society over the last ten years. Suddenly, everyone is poor, uneducated, the youth only want to take methamphetamines and chat on their phones or watch porn. They have become passive beings whose brains have been dynamited by the infinite scroll of the networks. And the pages also follow one another in scroll. It is cold and the neighbors of the lakeside house that Catt bought with Paul are couples of neo-Christians with eight children. And in the house, there is knocking on the walls. What is happening in the United States? The trendy French author Constance Debré claims that “The four spent the day together is the book of our era, in the same way that American Psycho was the book of the eighties and nineties”, and it is possible that she is right. The post-pandemic world is full of unease, hopelessness, and violence. And the novel that seeks to capture this spirit could be called post-dramatic, borrowing the adjective from the dramaturgy that seeks to take importance away from the text and give it to the moment of performance, to the relationship between the actor and the audience. It is the experience of reading the book that gives it meaning, more than any plot line that might exist: the discomfort, the incomprehension we feel when we have it in our hands.

Because the third part of the book is still missing, which is when things get really desperate and it seems to shift toward noir without really doing so: four young people spend the day together until two of them kill one for nothing, for an absurd argument about what happened behind a closed door. We are in 2025 and the destruction of the social fabric and the economic collapse of the middle class carried out since Trump's victory is complete: there is no trace left of social empathy, nor well-woven novel plots. We are on the B-side of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: the characters only want a little bit of crystal to cloud their minds and feel the blow of the fall less. Welcome to the post-dramatic world of Chris Kraus.