This latest work centers on characters pursuing new beginnings, trying to break free from drugs or toxic relationships, only to witness hope devolve into violence. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", making it deliberately jaded through recurring use. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the narrative. And yet, she appears to be undertaking her personal new beginning, as this appears a novel form of writing – observational, genuinely novelistic. However it proves to be laden with the recurring issues and styles as her previous works.
From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work
Chris Kraus began as an visual artist who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, converting intimate women's literature from abjection into defiance. She continued writing, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the letter form brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a maverick maker who had become a major property owner, so there was significant attention on real estate deals. It follows that she currently desires to explore fresh narrative sources, directing her gaze to the experiences of others, at a moment when she states that current political era makes confessional writing redundant.
Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning multiple eras – each trapped by their histories. There is the story of characters Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, relocating from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. There is the account of Kraus, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a community long abandoned by progressive politics only a short distance from the protagonist's home in rural Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader drawn to honed writing of the type the author herself often avoids, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the first section.
Being a reader who favors precise prose of the variety that the author tends to eschew, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the initial part. It possesses a novel degree of detail that allows space for minutiae, like the pail that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the start of the story, aided by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she exclaims; "a lovely toy", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."
Frustration and Disruption
I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this different style could continue through the novel. Kraus says here that she dislikes the enjoyment readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disruption, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her idol author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her past books returns in the second segment. Catt Greene is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul transitions between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a environment fueled by the anger and fear that drives Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on social media, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. On one occasion she says that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she could potentially understand something about an America that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even see".
The Murder Narrative
Then we reach to the murder itself – and the titular day experienced by the deceased with the perpetrator and his associates. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and details moment by moment what happened when the victim Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He sought a sexual encounter but seems amiably to have occupied the day with her companions, loitering fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.
Fascination and Incompletion
The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who gains dimension partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par
