This latest work is populated with individuals pursuing clean slates, trying to break free from drugs or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into conflict. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", rendering it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the narrative. And yet, she is embarking on her individual reinvention, because this appears a different type of work – observational, genuinely novelistic. However it turns out to be filled with the recurring issues and approaches as earlier books.
From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic
Chris Kraus was originally an visual artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming confessional female writing from humiliation into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the following three engaging and challenging novels missed the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a nonconformist creator who had evolved into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It makes sense that she presently aims to try out fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to external narratives, at a moment when she states that current political era turns intimate literature redundant.
Multiple Generations, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning three generations – each trapped by their pasts. We encounter the story of Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, moving from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. There is the narrative of the author, in the character of Catt Greene, confronting the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction her husband Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a community largely deserted by progressive politics only 80 miles from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.
For this reader fond of refined literature of the kind Kraus herself typically rejects, I was captivated by the literary tone of the opening part.
As a reader drawn to honed writing of the style that the author usually avoids, I was seduced by the literary tone of the first section. It exhibits a fresh level of observation that allows space for trivial aspects, like the container that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the start of the story, aided by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". Kraus writes the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."
Frustration and Disruption
I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this new voice could last out the book. The author states here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the unpolished style she shares with her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels reasserts itself in the second segment. Catt is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid Paul curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as Paul moves between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a world fueled by the anger and fear that drives Trump's victory. A significant portion discusses about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. In a moment she remarks that she's looking into the killing 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 see".
The Killing Story
Thus we arrive to the actual killing – and the titular day experienced by the victim with the killer and his friends. Kraus has compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what occurred as Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she offered adult photos. He was hoping for sex but seems affably to have spent the day in the company of her associates, loitering fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for aggressive outbursts.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt develops an obsession by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to go further into her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
