This latest work is populated with characters chasing after new beginnings, trying to break free from substance abuse or toxic relationships, only to witness hope devolve into violence. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "fresh start", making it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" recur in the story. Meanwhile, she is embarking on her own fresh start, as this seems a new kind of book – fact-based, authentically narrative. However it proves to be packed with the same dilemmas and approaches as past novels.
From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic
The writer was originally an visual artist who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as missives to a distant beloved, converting confessional female writing from humiliation into defiance. She continued writing, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the impact and rawness that the letter form brought to the voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her role as a renegade artist who had become a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It follows that she now wants to try out different types of content, turning outward to other people's stories, at a period in which she asserts that Trumpian politics renders personal narrative redundant.
Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing several time periods – all unable to escape their histories. The book includes the tale of Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, relocating from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. Additionally the account of Kraus, in the guise of Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a locality long abandoned by progressive politics only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.
As a reader attracted to refined literature of the type Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the opening part.
Being a reader who appreciates honed writing of the variety that the author often disregards, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that allows space for small details, like the container that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, aided by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a nice toy", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". She tells Emma's story with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this different style could last out the book. Kraus says here that she dislikes the satisfaction readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disruption, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels returns in the second segment. The protagonist is attempting to do up multiple decrepit residences in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while moving between two different states, unable to aid her husband control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a world propelled by the rage and anxiety that drives an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her listed profession modified from "writer" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. On one occasion she states that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an America that her social media opponents would be unable to grasp, would not even see".
The Homicide Account
So then we come to the homicide in question – and the titular day passed by the victim with the murderer and his companions. Kraus has excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what occurred as the victim Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, wandering about fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
Catt develops an obsession by the account, and I found myself captivated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards responsible documentation and reckless transgression clash in this segment. Yet I wished her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who comes alive partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the point that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
