This latest work centers on characters chasing after new beginnings, trying to break free from substance abuse or toxic relationships, only to witness hope devolve into violence. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", transforming it into deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Phrases such as "He aimed to start over" and "They chose to begin anew" recur in the story. At the same time, Kraus herself is embarking on her personal new beginning, because this presents as a novel form of writing – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. However it proves to be packed with the familiar conflicts and approaches as earlier books.
From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic
Chris Kraus began as an visual artist who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, converting intimate women's literature from humiliation into assassination. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the letter form brought to the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her role as a nonconformist creator who had evolved into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It follows that she currently desires to experiment with fresh narrative sources, turning outward to external narratives, at a time when she claims that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative unnecessary.
Several Eras, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering three generations – all unable to escape their backgrounds. We encounter the narrative about Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, moving from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. There is the narrative of the author, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband a man named Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a town long abandoned by progressive politics only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in a remote part of Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader fond of refined literature of the sort the author herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the literary tone of the initial segment.
As someone who reads drawn to honed writing of the kind that Kraus herself 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 protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, assisted by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a nice toy", he answers, "the nuanced interpretations of terms tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". Kraus writes the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this new voice could continue through the novel. The author states here that she is annoyed by the pleasure readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels comes back in the second segment. The protagonist is attempting to do up multiple decrepit residences in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between Minnesota and LA, unsuccessful in assisting Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as her spouse cycles through low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a society propelled by the rage and anxiety that powers an electoral success. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her occupation changed from "novelist" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she says that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would fail to comprehend, would not even perceive".
The Murder Narrative
Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the referenced day spent by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his associates. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and details moment by moment what happened when Brandon came to visit Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day in the company of her associates, loitering having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for aggressive outbursts.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt develops an obsession by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to go further into her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who comes alive in part due to Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
