This latest work centers on individuals pursuing fresh starts, attempting to leave behind drugs or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into violence. Chris Kraus frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", rendering it deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the narrative. Meanwhile, Kraus herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, because this presents as a novel form of writing – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. However it proves to be filled with the same dilemmas and styles as her previous works.
From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic
The writer was originally an visual artist who transitioned to writing unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, elevating confessional female writing from humiliation into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels lacked the power and directness that the epistolary style brought to the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her position as a maverick maker who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It follows that she now wants to explore new kinds of material, directing her gaze to other people's stories, at a moment when she claims that contemporary political climate turns intimate literature redundant.
Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering several time periods – none able to break free from their histories. There is the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, relocating from the New York borough to a pastoral setting. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. The third thread involves the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a community long abandoned by progressive politics only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader attracted to refined literature of the sort Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the narrative style of the initial segment.
As a reader who favors honed writing of the variety that the author tends to eschew, I was won over by the literary tone of the first section. 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 beginning of the narrative, helped by her adored dad. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a nice toy", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like hard candy". The author narrates the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."
Frustration and Disruption
I was fated to feel let down when I hoped this different style could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she resents the satisfaction audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she shares with her hero author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her past books reasserts itself in the second segment. The protagonist is attempting to do up multiple decrepit residences in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help her husband control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as her spouse moves between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a society fueled by the hostility and dread that drives a political win. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "author" to "property owner" on a reference site. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. At one point she says that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her online critics would not understand, would not even see".
The Murder Narrative
Then we reach to the actual killing – and the titular day spent by the deceased with the perpetrator and his companions. Kraus has excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when the victim Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, wandering about fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by her romantic interest Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.
Obsession and Unfinished Business
Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and daring boundary-pushing clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The standout figure is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels oddly unfinished, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
