The new book features protagonists chasing after clean slates, attempting to leave behind addictions or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Chris Kraus frequently uses the phrase "new beginning", transforming it into deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the narrative. Meanwhile, Kraus herself appears to be undertaking her own fresh start, because this presents as a different type of work – observational, truly literary. Yet it proves to be filled with the familiar conflicts and styles as past novels.
From Accidental Writer to Iconic Work
Chris Kraus was originally an creative who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as missives to a distant beloved, elevating confessional female writing from abjection into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the following three fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the impact and rawness that the correspondence format imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a maverick maker who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on real estate deals. It is logical that she now wants to try out different types of content, directing her gaze to other people's stories, at a time when she asserts that current political era makes confessional writing obsolete.
Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, encompassing several time periods – none able to break free from their backgrounds. We encounter the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, moving from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the character of Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband Paul. Finally the story of the murder of one troubled youth by another in a town mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.
For this reader drawn to polished prose of the kind the author herself often avoids, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.
Being a reader who appreciates crafted language of the kind that the author tends to eschew, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. There is a fresh level of observation that makes room for trivial aspects, like the bucket that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, aided by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". Kraus writes Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not entirely her own."
Frustration and Disruption
I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this fresh tone could continue through the novel. The author states here that she resents the satisfaction readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disruption, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her idol author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works comes back in the second segment. The protagonist is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help her husband control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as Paul cycles through poorly supported positions as an recovery specialist in a society driven by the anger and fear that powers a political win. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her professional designation altered from "author" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. At one point she states that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she might be able to learn something about an America that her online critics would not understand, would overlook entirely".
The Homicide Account
So then we come to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day passed by the deceased with the killer and his friends. Kraus utilizes great source material, and knows hour by hour what happened when the victim Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He sought a sexual encounter but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, mooching around fixing his automobile and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.
Obsession and Unfinished Business
Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. Yet I wished her to explore more thoroughly her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partly through Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par
