This latest work features individuals chasing after clean slates, attempting to leave behind substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into aggression. The author often employs the phrase "fresh start", transforming it into willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the story. And yet, the author herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, because this presents as a new kind of book – observational, truly literary. But then it turns out to be filled with the familiar conflicts and approaches as earlier books.
From Accidental Writer to Iconic Work
Chris Kraus began as an visual artist who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, structured as epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting confessional female writing from humiliation into rebellion. She continued writing, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels did not possess the impact and rawness that the letter form infused into the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a maverick maker who had evolved into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on housing investments. It follows that she now wants to try out new kinds of material, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a period in which she claims that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative redundant.
Three Generations, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, spanning several time periods – all unable to escape their backgrounds. We encounter the story of characters Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, moving from the New York borough to a pastoral setting. There is the narrative of the author, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the late recognition of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband a man named Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one directionless individual by another in a locality largely deserted by liberal ideals only a short distance from Catt's cottage in a remote part of Minnesota.
For this reader fond of honed writing of the kind Kraus typically rejects, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the first section.
As someone who reads who favors crafted language of the style that Kraus often disregards, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the initial part. There is a fresh level of observation that accommodates trivial aspects, like the bucket that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, assisted by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she exclaims; "a great plaything", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like hard candy". The author narrates the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was fated to feel let down when I wished this fresh tone could continue through the novel. The author states here that she dislikes the enjoyment those who appreciate polished prose have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels reasserts itself in the middle section. The protagonist is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while shuttling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help her husband manage his alcohol use. She is overwhelmed as her spouse cycles through underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a world driven by the anger and fear that drives Trump's victory. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on social media, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. On one occasion she says that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an the United States that her social media opponents would not understand, would not even perceive".
The Homicide Account
Then we reach to the actual killing – and the referenced day spent by the deceased with the murderer and his associates. The author possesses great source material, and details moment by moment what happened when a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after connecting via an application where she sold sex pictures. He sought a sexual encounter but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt develops an obsession by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman spiraling out of control in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
