Can a cover doom a book?

I’d argue that’s what happens with “The Four Spent the Day Together.” It’s 304 pages long but the event that’s detailed on its back cover — three young people on the Iron Range murder an acquaintance while on a meth binge — does not happen until page 182. That incident also gives the book its title, and the effect is that the first 181 pages feel rushed and summarized, as if novelist Chris Kraus is racing to fill us in on some details before, more than halfway through her book, we finally get to the meat of it.

How come? The publisher seems to hope we’ll think “The Four Spent the Day Together” is a murder-y thriller, which it isn’t. (In the interests of full disclosure, the Minnesota Star Tribune makes several appearances in the book, which cites Stephen Montemayor’s reporting on drug pipelines to Minnesota.)

Kraus caused a sensation with her 1997 novel “I Love Dick,” which also became an attention-getting (if short-lived) Netflix series that starred Kathryn Hahn as Chris Kraus. Essentially, Kraus is the main character again in “The Four Spent the Day Together,” although her name has been changed. The protagonist, called Catt, shares many biographical details with her creator, including the fact that she wrote a novel called “I Love Dick” that is being turned into a TV show but, let’s hope, not including: a disastrous marriage to a backsliding alcoholic, difficult relationships with her parents (and a sister who all but disappears from this novel) and the murder that takes place near the summer cabin Catt and husband Paul often escape to on the Iron Range.

In many ways, “The Four Spent the Day Together” feels more like notes for a novel than a finished product. Decades race by in the space of a few pages, there are huge gaps in the narrative and most of the novel, especially the first half, is very tell-not-show, with Kraus describing major events in the lives of the characters without pausing to consider what they mean or even include dialogue. Anti-climactically, the final “notes” in the novel are a series of social-media posts that the book already has quoted from extensively.

Clearly, Kraus is interested in class differences in America’s supposedly classless society and she writes about them with insight, as when a young woman tries to help Catt understand adolescent life on the Range: “You see the economic gaps among kids, how much their parents make, by who they hang out with. All the lower-income kids band together. The upper-income kids have lots of different groups, but the lower-income kids just have one group.”

Growing up on the East Coast, Catt is painfully aware of the differences between her middle-class family and the wealthier, more respected families that literally live across the street, in a tonier development. Catt’s on the other side of the class divide as an adult, after “I Love Dick” unexpectedly takes off and she and Paul can afford to try to get away from it all on the Iron Range, where it’s evident that many of their neighbors are struggling. Paul, in fact, seems determined to use booze and drugs to “escape” their comfortable life, which makes him feel profoundly uncomfortable.

It’s a sordid story, the pain and emptiness of which are underscored by Kraus’ unadorned prose. When things start coming together, it’s compelling stuff. But there’s way too much aimless wandering on the way there.

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The Four Spent the Day Together

By: Chris Kraus.

Publisher: Scribner, 304 pages.

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