This latest work is populated with individuals seeking new beginnings, attempting to leave behind drugs or harmful partnerships, only to witness hope devolve into conflict. Kraus frequently uses the phrase "fresh start", making it deliberately jaded through recurring use. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" are scattered across the story. At the same time, she appears to be undertaking her individual reinvention, since this seems a new kind of book – observational, truly literary. Yet it reveals itself to be laden with the recurring issues and approaches as earlier books.
From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic
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 missives to a distant beloved, elevating confessional female writing from self-debasement into rebellion. She kept producing books, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the impact and rawness that the letter form infused into the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a nonconformist creator who had turned into a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It makes sense that she currently desires to try out fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a moment when she claims that current political era makes confessional writing obsolete.
Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning three generations – all unable to escape their histories. There is the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, relocating from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction a man named Paul. Finally the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a town mostly forsaken by progressive politics only a short distance from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.
For this reader drawn to polished prose of the type Kraus herself often avoids, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the opening part.
Being a reader who favors crafted language of the variety that Kraus usually avoids, I was captivated by the literary tone of the opening segment. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates minutiae, like the container that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the opening of the book, aided by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a great plaything", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language rolling around in their mouths like sweet treats". The author narrates Emma's story with interest and closeness. "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. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the satisfaction readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to disruption, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her hero Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels reasserts itself in the second segment. The protagonist is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while moving between Minnesota and LA, unable to aid Paul manage his alcohol use. She feels helpless as her spouse cycles through underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a world propelled by the anger and fear that underpins Trump's victory. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on a platform, her listed profession modified from "writer" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she says that she's investigating the murder so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her online critics would not understand, would not even perceive".
The Murder Narrative
Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the referenced day passed by the murdered individual with the killer and his companions. The author possesses great source material, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when Brandon came to meet Brittney after connecting via an application where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, loitering fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
Catt develops an obsession by the narrative, and I found myself captivated by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and reckless transgression clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to go further into her own obsessions here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who gains dimension in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par
