The new book is populated with individuals chasing after new beginnings, struggling to escape drugs or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into conflict. Chris Kraus frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", making it deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the story. Meanwhile, the author herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, as this appears a different type of work – fact-based, truly literary. Yet it reveals itself to be laden with the recurring issues and styles as earlier books.
From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work
Chris Kraus began as an creative who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming personal female narrative from humiliation into assassination. She continued writing, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels missed the shock and immediacy that the letter form infused into the voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a renegade artist who had turned into a extensive real estate holder, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It follows that she now wants to explore fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to external narratives, at a time when she claims that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative redundant.
Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering three generations – none able to break free from their pasts. There is the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, representations of Kraus's parents, transitioning from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a town mostly forsaken by liberal ideals only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.
As a reader attracted to honed writing of the kind Kraus herself typically rejects, I was seduced by the narrative style of the opening part.
Being a reader who appreciates honed writing of the kind that Kraus often disregards, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates minutiae, like the bucket that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the opening of the book, helped by her adored dad. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a nice toy", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". She tells Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was fated to feel let down when I expected this different style could last out the book. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her hero author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her past books reasserts itself in the middle section. Catt is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as Paul moves between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a society propelled by the rage and anxiety that powers a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her occupation changed from "author" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she remarks that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn something about an the nation that her online critics would not understand, would not even perceive".
The Murder Narrative
Then we reach to the actual killing – and the referenced day spent by the victim with the killer and his friends. Kraus utilizes compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what happened when the victim Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, mooching around getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.
Obsession and Unfinished Business
The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her own obsessions here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who gains dimension partly through Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par
