Chris Kraus and the Art of the Landlord

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?