In hot pursuit

Honest to a fault about the difficulty of determining the truth of events, Chris Kraus produces a page-turner.

- BY JACK ROSS

It's a bit difficult to explain why I found Chris Kraus's latest novel such a riveting read.

On the surface it sounds like a bit of a hard sell.

To start with, is it really a novel? That's how it's described on the cover, but it's certainly not a conventional example. The main character, Catt Greene, serves mainly as a transparent mask for the author, a renowned experimentalist known principally for her tricks with literary form.

It's divided into three parts. The first is a description of the protagonist's grim childhood in Milford, Connecticut. The second, set in Balsam, Minnesota, gives an account of her disintegrating marriage to an alcoholic.

The third is her attempt to recreate the sordid real-life murder of a young man by two friends of a young woman from whom he attempted to buy sex.

Each of these sections, melodramatic though they may sound, is described in the deadpan, unheightened language that has distinguished Kraus's writing from the very first, her breakthrough novel I Love Dick.

"Well-meaning friends suggested she try writing short stories but she could not grasp the form or the point. She'd never studied creative writing, joined a group or even taken a workshop. To her, writing was research. She had no writing practice.

The only way she could do it was by default - the times when she was possessed by an idea too large and upsetting to formulate.