This latest work centers on protagonists chasing after fresh starts, struggling to escape drugs or harmful partnerships, only to witness hope devolve into conflict. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", rendering it deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" are scattered across the story. Meanwhile, the author herself is embarking on her own fresh start, as this seems a novel form of writing – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. However it reveals itself to be packed with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as past novels.
From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic
Chris Kraus was originally an creative who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, transforming confessional female writing from humiliation into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the power and directness that the correspondence format imparted to the narrative 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 considerable focus on real estate deals. It is logical that she currently desires to experiment with new kinds of material, turning outward to other people's stories, at a time when she claims that Trumpian politics makes confessional writing redundant.
Three Generations, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering three generations – each trapped by their histories. The book includes the tale of characters Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, transitioning from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one directionless individual by another in a town largely deserted by progressive politics only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader drawn to polished prose of the kind Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.
Being a reader who favors crafted language of the style that Kraus tends to eschew, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the initial part. There is a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for minutiae, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child dislodges from ice at the start of the story, assisted by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like hard candy". She tells Emma's story with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was fated to feel let down when I hoped this fresh tone could last out the book. The author states here that she dislikes the enjoyment audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she echoes from her idol author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her past books reasserts itself in the second segment. Catt is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting her husband curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as Paul transitions between low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a world fueled by the rage and anxiety that drives a political win. A significant portion discusses about the protagonist facing cancellation on a platform, her occupation changed from "writer" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. On one occasion she says that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would be unable to grasp, would not even see".
The Homicide Account
Thus we arrive to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day passed by the deceased with the killer and his associates. The author possesses great source material, and knows hour by hour what transpired when Brandon came to meet Brittney after connecting via an application where she offered adult photos. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, mooching around getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The standout figure is Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
