This latest work features protagonists seeking fresh starts, attempting to leave behind substance abuse or harmful partnerships, only to see hope turn into aggression. The author frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into willfully cynical through recurring use. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the narrative. Meanwhile, Kraus herself appears to be undertaking her own fresh start, since this seems a different type of work – observational, authentically narrative. But then it proves to be laden with the recurring issues and aesthetics as past novels.
From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book
Chris Kraus started out as an artist who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, elevating confessional female writing from humiliation into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels lacked the impact and rawness that the epistolary style imparted to the voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a renegade artist who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It is logical that she currently desires to try out different types of content, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a time when she states that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing redundant.
Multiple Generations, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering several time periods – all unable to escape their backgrounds. We encounter the tale of Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, transitioning from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a locality long abandoned by progressive politics only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.
As a reader fond of refined literature of the sort the author herself tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the first section.
Being a reader who favors crafted language of the variety that Kraus herself often disregards, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the initial part. It exhibits a fresh level of observation that accommodates minutiae, like the container that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a great plaything", he answers, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like hard candy". The author narrates Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."
Frustration and Disruption
I was destined to be disappointed when I wished this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she resents the enjoyment those who appreciate polished prose have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels reasserts itself in the central part. The protagonist is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while moving between Minnesota and LA, failing to help her husband curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a world propelled by the hostility and dread that underpins a political win. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on social media, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "landlord" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she remarks that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".
The Murder Narrative
So then we come to the actual killing – and the eponymous day experienced by the deceased with the murderer and his companions. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day with her companions, mooching around fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.
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 tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her individual preoccupations here. The standout figure is Brittney, who becomes vivid partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. The author informs us that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par
