This latest work is populated with characters pursuing clean slates, trying to break free from addictions or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into violence. The author often employs the phrase "fresh start", transforming it into willfully cynical through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He aimed to start over" and "They opted for a clean break" are scattered across the text. Meanwhile, Kraus herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, since this presents as a novel form of writing – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. However it proves to be filled with the same dilemmas and styles as her previous works.
From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book
Chris Kraus began as an visual artist who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, converting intimate women's literature from humiliation into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the power and directness that the correspondence format brought to the voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her role as a maverick maker who had turned into a extensive real estate holder, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It makes sense that she now wants to try out new kinds of material, directing her gaze to other people's stories, at a period in which she asserts that current political era makes confessional writing redundant.
Several Eras, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering multiple eras – each trapped by their pasts. There is the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, transitioning from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. Then there is the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction a man named Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a locality largely deserted by progressive politics only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.
For this reader drawn to polished prose of the type 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 style that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was captivated by the storytelling approach of the first section. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that makes room for minutiae, like the container that the protagonist as a child dislodges from ice at the opening of the book, assisted by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a great plaything", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like piece candy". She tells Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not entirely her own."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was fated to feel let down when I expected this fresh tone could continue through the novel. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the satisfaction readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels comes back in the middle section. Catt is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as her spouse moves between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a society fueled by the anger and fear that drives Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her occupation changed from "writer" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. At one point she remarks that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an the United States that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".
The Homicide Account
So then we come to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day spent by the deceased with the perpetrator and his companions. Kraus has excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what happened when Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, loitering fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The standout figure is Brittney herself, who comes alive partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels oddly unfinished, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
