This latest work features protagonists chasing after clean slates, trying to break free from drugs or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into conflict. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", rendering it deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the narrative. At the same time, the author herself is embarking on her own fresh start, since this presents as a new kind of book – observational, authentically narrative. However it proves to be laden with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as earlier books.
From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work
Chris Kraus began as an artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting confessional female writing from abjection into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a renegade artist who had become a major property owner, so there was significant attention on real estate deals. It makes sense that she now wants to try out new kinds of material, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a moment when she asserts that current political era makes confessional writing obsolete.
Several Eras, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning several time periods – each trapped by their pasts. There is the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, versions of the author's parents, relocating from the Bronx to a pastoral setting. Additionally the account of Kraus, in the guise of Catt Greene, grappling with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a community largely deserted by progressive politics only 80 miles from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader fond of refined literature of the type Kraus tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the initial segment.
Being a reader drawn to crafted language of the kind that Kraus herself often disregards, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the first section. It possesses a novel degree of detail that allows space for minutiae, like the container that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, assisted by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a nice toy", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like piece candy". She tells Emma's narrative with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was fated to feel let down when I expected this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she resents the enjoyment readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels reasserts itself in the central part. Catt Greene is attempting to do up 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 curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as her spouse transitions between poorly supported positions as an substance abuse counselor in a society driven by the rage and anxiety that underpins a political win. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "landlord" on the online encyclopedia. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. In a moment she states that she's investigating the murder so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would fail to comprehend, would not even perceive".
The Homicide Account
So then we come to the homicide in question – and the titular day experienced by the deceased with the killer and his friends. Kraus utilizes excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what occurred as Brandon came to visit Brittney after connecting via an application where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, mooching around fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has repeatedly received inpatient care for aggressive outbursts.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who comes alive partly through Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The complete segment feels oddly unfinished, to the extent that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
