This latest work is populated with individuals pursuing new beginnings, struggling to escape drugs or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into conflict. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "new beginning", rendering it willfully cynical through recurring use. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" appear throughout the text. Meanwhile, Kraus herself is embarking on her own fresh start, as this seems a novel form of writing – documentarian, truly literary. But then it turns out to be filled with the familiar conflicts and approaches as earlier books.
From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book
Kraus began as an visual artist who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting intimate women's literature from abjection into rebellion. She kept producing books, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels lacked the impact and rawness that the correspondence format imparted to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a nonconformist creator who had evolved into a major property owner, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It follows that she currently desires to explore new kinds of material, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a period in which she states that current political era turns intimate literature redundant.
Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, spanning several time periods – none able to break free from their pasts. There is the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, relocating from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. Finally the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a locality largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.
For this reader fond of polished prose of the type Kraus herself typically rejects, I was captivated by the literary tone of the initial segment.
As someone who reads who appreciates honed writing of the variety that the author tends to eschew, I was won over by the novelistic voice of the first section. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates small details, like the pail that the young Catt frees from the ice at the opening of the book, assisted by her adored dad. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she exclaims; "a nice toy", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like piece candy". She tells the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was destined to be disappointed when I wished this different style could continue through the novel. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the pleasure readers like me have gotten 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 returns in the central part. Catt is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while moving between Minnesota and LA, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul cycles through underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a world fueled by the anger and fear that drives a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on a platform, her professional designation altered from "author" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. In a moment she states that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would be unable to grasp, would overlook entirely".
The Killing Story
So then we come to the homicide in question – and the titular day spent by the victim with the killer and his friends. The author possesses excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when the victim Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He sought a sexual encounter but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, loitering having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.
Obsession and Unfinished Business
The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to go further into her personal fixations here. The compelling persona 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 the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par
