The new book centers on characters chasing after clean slates, attempting to leave behind substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into violence. Chris Kraus frequently uses the phrase "fresh start", making it deliberately jaded through recurring use. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the text. At the same time, Kraus herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, since this seems a novel form of writing – fact-based, authentically narrative. However it proves to be packed with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as past novels.
From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work
The writer started out as an artist who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming intimate women's literature from self-debasement into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style brought to the voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a renegade artist who had turned into a extensive real estate holder, so there was significant attention on real estate deals. It follows that she currently desires to experiment with fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a period in which she claims that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative obsolete.
Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing three generations – all unable to escape their histories. There is the tale of characters Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, moving from the urban environment to a pastoral setting. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the character of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one directionless individual by another in a town long abandoned by liberal ideals only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.
For this reader attracted to refined literature of the sort the author herself typically rejects, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the first section.
As someone who reads who favors crafted language of the style that Kraus usually avoids, I was won over by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates trivial aspects, like the container that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her adored dad. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she exclaims; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like sweet treats". Kraus writes Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."
Frustration and Disruption
I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this different style could continue through the novel. Kraus says here that she dislikes the pleasure audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the unpolished style she shares with her idol Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her earlier works comes back in the second segment. Catt Greene is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as her spouse cycles through low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a environment propelled by the hostility and dread that powers an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her occupation changed from "novelist" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. She still gives the impression 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 America that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".
The Murder Narrative
Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the titular day spent by the murdered individual with the murderer and his friends. Kraus has compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when the victim Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day with her companions, loitering getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who comes alive partly through Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par
