The new book features characters chasing after clean slates, attempting to leave behind addictions or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into violence. The author frequently uses the phrase "fresh start", transforming it into intentionally weary through recurring use. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They opted for a clean break" recur in the text. At the same time, Kraus herself appears to be undertaking her personal new beginning, as this seems a novel form of writing – documentarian, authentically narrative. However it proves to be filled with the familiar conflicts and approaches as past novels.
From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work
Chris Kraus started out as an artist who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting personal female narrative from abjection into assassination. She continued writing, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the power and directness that the epistolary style brought to the voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her role as a nonconformist creator who had evolved into a extensive real estate holder, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It is logical that she currently desires to try out fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to external narratives, at a time when she asserts that current political era turns intimate literature redundant.
Several Eras, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering three generations – none able to break free from their histories. We encounter the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, relocating from the urban environment to a pastoral setting. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one directionless individual by another in a town long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only 80 miles from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader drawn to honed writing of the sort the author herself typically rejects, I was seduced by the narrative style of the opening part.
Being a reader who favors honed writing of the kind that the author usually avoids, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. There is a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates minutiae, like the container that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, assisted by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a great plaything", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". The author narrates 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 fresh tone could last out the book. The author states here that she resents the pleasure audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she has in common with her hero author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works reasserts itself in the middle section. The protagonist is working on refurbishing three dozen dilapidated units in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid her husband control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as her spouse moves between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a society propelled by the anger and fear that drives an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her occupation changed from "author" to "real estate holder" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she remarks that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she could potentially understand something about an America that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even perceive".
The Murder Narrative
So then we come to the actual killing – and the eponymous day passed by the deceased with the murderer and his companions. Kraus has excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what transpired when the victim Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, wandering about getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.
Obsession and Unfinished Business
Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I found myself captivated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid in part due to the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a struggling, neglected community. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
