This latest work features individuals seeking fresh starts, trying to break free from addictions or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into violence. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", making it willfully cynical through recurring use. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the text. And yet, she is embarking on her personal new beginning, since this presents as a different type of work – fact-based, authentically narrative. However it turns out to be packed with the familiar conflicts and styles as past novels.
From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic
Kraus started out as an artist who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, converting confessional female writing from abjection into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the following three compelling and abrasive novels missed the power and directness that the epistolary style imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a maverick maker who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was much discussion on real estate deals. It follows that she currently desires to try out different types of content, turning outward to the experiences of others, at a period in which she asserts that current political era makes confessional writing unnecessary.
Three Generations, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering multiple eras – each trapped by their pasts. There is the narrative about Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, relocating from the urban environment to a pastoral setting. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband a man named Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a locality largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.
For this reader fond of refined literature of the sort the author herself typically rejects, I was seduced by the narrative style of the initial segment.
As someone who reads drawn to crafted language of the style that the author tends to eschew, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for small details, like the bucket that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the opening of the book, helped by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a nice toy", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this fresh tone could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the satisfaction those who appreciate polished prose have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her hero author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her past books reasserts itself in the middle section. The protagonist is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a society driven by the rage and anxiety that drives Trump's victory. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on a platform, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "property owner" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to be overly concerned about this. In a moment she states that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she could potentially understand something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even perceive".
The Murder Narrative
Thus we arrive to the actual killing – and the referenced day spent by the deceased with the perpetrator and his associates. Kraus utilizes compelling foundational content, and details moment by moment what transpired when Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, loitering having his vehicle repaired and covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by Brittney's partner Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for aggressive outbursts.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who comes alive partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels oddly unfinished, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
