The new book centers on characters pursuing clean slates, struggling to escape substance abuse or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into conflict. Kraus frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Phrases such as "He aimed to start over" and "They opted for a clean break" recur in the story. And yet, the author herself seems to be making her personal new beginning, because this presents as a novel form of writing – documentarian, truly literary. But then it proves to be laden with the recurring issues and aesthetics as earlier books.
From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work
Chris Kraus was originally an visual artist who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating confessional female writing from abjection into defiance. She continued writing, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style imparted to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her role as a nonconformist creator who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It is logical that she currently desires to explore fresh narrative sources, directing her gaze to the experiences of others, at a period in which she claims that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature redundant.
Several Eras, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, spanning multiple eras – all unable to escape their histories. There is the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, versions of the author's parents, transitioning from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. Additionally the account of Kraus, in the character of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a town largely deserted by liberal ideals only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.
For this reader fond of honed writing of the sort Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the narrative style of the initial segment.
As someone who reads drawn to honed writing of the style that Kraus herself often disregards, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the first section. It possesses a novel degree of detail that accommodates trivial aspects, like the container that the young Catt frees from the ice at the start of the story, aided by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". Kraus writes the tale of Emma 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 expected this different style could continue through the novel. The author states here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the unpolished style she has in common with her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her past books reasserts itself in the middle section. Catt Greene is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between two different states, failing to help Paul control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as Paul transitions between low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a world propelled by the rage and anxiety that underpins a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she states that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would fail to comprehend, would not even see".
The Killing Story
So then we come to the murder itself – and the titular day spent by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his companions. Kraus utilizes compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what happened when Brandon came to visit Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day with her companions, mooching around getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to go further into her own obsessions here. The standout figure is Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman derailing in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
