This latest work is populated with individuals pursuing fresh starts, attempting to leave behind addictions or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into violence. The author frequently uses the phrase "fresh start", making it intentionally weary through its repetitions. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" appear throughout the text. And yet, the author herself is embarking on her individual reinvention, because this presents as a new kind of book – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. However it reveals itself to be laden with the familiar conflicts and styles as her previous works.
From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book
Chris Kraus started out as an visual artist who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, converting confessional female writing from abjection into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format brought to the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a renegade artist who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It follows that she now wants to try out different types of content, directing her gaze to other people's stories, at a period in which she asserts that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative obsolete.
Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, encompassing several time periods – each trapped by their pasts. We encounter the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, relocating from the urban environment to a pastoral setting. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband Paul. Finally the story of the murder of one troubled youth by another in a town mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from the protagonist's home in rural Minnesota.
For this reader fond of honed writing of the sort Kraus herself typically rejects, I was captivated by the narrative style of the first section.
As a reader drawn to crafted language of the kind that Kraus tends to eschew, I was won over by the novelistic voice of the initial part. It possesses a novel degree of detail that allows space for minutiae, like the pail that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the start of the story, assisted by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a nice toy", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms rolling around in their mouths like hard candy". She tells Emma's narrative with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."
Frustration and Disruption
I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she resents the pleasure readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her idol author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books reasserts itself in the second segment. Catt is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help her husband manage his alcohol use. She experiences powerlessness as Paul cycles through underfunded jobs as an substance abuse counselor in a environment propelled by the hostility and dread that powers Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her occupation changed from "author" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. At one point she states that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she could potentially understand something about an America that her online critics would not understand, would overlook entirely".
The Homicide Account
Thus we arrive to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day experienced by the deceased with the killer and his companions. Kraus has excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what happened when a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day in the company of her associates, mooching around having his vehicle repaired and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.
Obsession and Unfinished Business
Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her individual preoccupations here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who comes alive in part due to Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par
