This latest work centers on protagonists seeking fresh starts, struggling to escape substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into aggression. Chris Kraus frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into intentionally weary through recurring use. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the text. And yet, she is embarking on her individual reinvention, since this presents as a new kind of book – documentarian, truly literary. Yet it turns out to be laden with the recurring issues and styles as past novels.
From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic
The writer began as an visual artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as missives to a distant beloved, elevating confessional female writing from humiliation into defiance. She continued writing, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels did not possess 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 large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It follows that she currently desires to explore new kinds of material, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a moment when she claims that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature obsolete.
Multiple Generations, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering multiple eras – none able to break free from their pasts. There is the story of Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, transitioning from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of Catt Greene, confronting the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a community largely deserted by progressive politics only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.
As a reader fond of polished prose of the kind Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the narrative style of the first section.
As a reader who appreciates honed writing of the variety that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the first section. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for small details, like the container that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a nice toy", he replies, "the nuanced interpretations of terms rolling around in their mouths like sweet treats". The author narrates Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this fresh tone could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels reasserts itself in the second segment. Catt is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between two different states, unable to aid Paul control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a society driven by the anger and fear that underpins Trump's victory. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her professional designation altered from "author" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. At one point she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would be unable to grasp, would not even see".
The Murder Narrative
Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the eponymous day spent by the deceased with the perpetrator and his associates. Kraus utilizes excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what occurred as a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day with her companions, loitering having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.
Fascination and Incompletion
The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and reckless transgression clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who comes alive in part due to Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the point that her narrative ends almost mid-par
