The new book centers on characters seeking fresh starts, struggling to escape addictions or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into violence. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", making it intentionally weary through its repetitions. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They opted for a clean break" recur in the story. And yet, the author herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, since this appears a new kind of book – observational, genuinely novelistic. Yet it proves to be filled with the same dilemmas and approaches as earlier books.
From Accidental Writer to Iconic Work
Kraus began as an creative who entered the literary world somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, converting intimate women's literature from abjection into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the impact and rawness that the correspondence format brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her position as a nonconformist creator who had become a major property owner, so there was significant attention on real estate deals. It follows that she presently aims to experiment with different types of content, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a time when she asserts that current political era turns intimate literature obsolete.
Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering several time periods – each trapped by their backgrounds. We encounter the tale of characters Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, relocating from the Bronx to a pastoral setting. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one directionless individual by another in a community mostly forsaken by progressive politics only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.
For this reader attracted to honed writing of the sort Kraus herself often avoids, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the initial segment.
Being a reader who favors honed writing of the kind that Kraus usually avoids, I was won over by the literary tone of the initial part. There is a fresh level of observation that accommodates trivial aspects, like the pail that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the opening of the book, aided by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a great plaything", he replies, "the nuanced interpretations of terms rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". Kraus writes the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not entirely her own."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was fated to feel let down when I hoped this fresh tone could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the pleasure audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her idol Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works reasserts itself in the second segment. Catt is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid her husband control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul moves between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a society propelled by the anger and fear that underpins an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her professional designation altered from "author" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she states that she's investigating the murder so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an America that her Twitter detractors would be unable to grasp, would overlook entirely".
The Murder Narrative
So then we come to the murder itself – and the referenced day experienced by the victim with the murderer and his friends. Kraus has excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what happened when the victim Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, loitering getting his car mended and funding treats and narcotics, before being murdered by her romantic interest Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. Yet I wished her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
