The new book features individuals seeking fresh starts, struggling to escape substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into violence. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", rendering it willfully cynical through recurring use. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" appear throughout the text. At the same time, the author herself is embarking on her own fresh start, as this seems a different type of work – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. However it proves to be filled with the recurring issues and aesthetics as past novels.
From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book
Chris Kraus was originally an visual artist who transitioned to writing unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating intimate women's literature from abjection into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format imparted to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a renegade artist who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was much discussion on real estate deals. It is logical that she now wants to try out fresh narrative sources, turning outward to the experiences of others, at a period in which she claims that contemporary political climate turns intimate literature redundant.
Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning multiple eras – each trapped by their backgrounds. The book includes the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, moving from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. Additionally the account of Kraus, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one directionless individual by another in a locality largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from the protagonist's home in rural Minnesota.
For this reader drawn to honed writing of the sort Kraus often avoids, I was seduced by the narrative style of the initial segment.
Being a reader who appreciates crafted language of the kind that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the first section. It possesses a novel degree of detail that makes room for minutiae, like the pail that the young Catt frees from the ice at the start of the story, helped by her adored dad. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a lovely toy", he answers, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like piece candy". Kraus writes Emma's story with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not entirely her own."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was fated to feel let down when I wished this different style could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the satisfaction audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to disruption, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her idol Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels reasserts itself in the middle section. The protagonist is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help her husband control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through poorly supported positions as an substance abuse counselor in a environment propelled by the rage and anxiety that underpins an electoral success. A significant portion discusses about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her occupation changed 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 says that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she could potentially understand something about an America that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even see".
The Homicide Account
So then we come to the actual killing – and the titular day spent by the victim with the killer and his associates. Kraus has excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what occurred as Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but seems affably to have spent the day with her companions, mooching around having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who gains dimension partly through the protagonist's connection to her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman spiraling out of control in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The complete segment feels oddly unfinished, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par
