The new book features characters chasing after fresh starts, attempting to leave behind substance abuse or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into conflict. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "new beginning", transforming it into willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the text. At the same time, the author herself seems to be making her personal new beginning, because this seems a new kind of book – documentarian, authentically narrative. Yet it proves to be filled with the recurring issues and approaches as past novels.
From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic
Kraus started out as an visual artist who transitioned to writing unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating personal female narrative from humiliation into assassination. She continued writing, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the letter form imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her role as a renegade artist who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It follows that she presently aims to experiment with fresh narrative sources, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a time when she states that Trumpian politics makes confessional writing redundant.
Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, encompassing several time periods – none able to break free from their histories. The book includes the tale of Emma and Jasper, versions of the author's parents, relocating from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one troubled youth by another in a town mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's cottage in a remote part of Minnesota.
As a reader fond of honed writing of the type the author herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the narrative style of the initial segment.
As someone who reads drawn to crafted language of the style that the author usually avoids, I was seduced by the literary tone of the opening segment. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates small details, like the bucket that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the start of the story, assisted by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a great plaything", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". Kraus writes the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was fated to feel let down when I wished this fresh tone could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she has in common with her idol Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her earlier works reasserts itself in the central part. Catt is attempting to do up multiple decrepit residences in the city's most challenging districts while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help her husband control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a environment driven by the hostility and dread that powers an electoral success. A significant portion discusses about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her listed profession modified from "writer" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she states that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she could potentially understand something about an America that her social media opponents would not understand, would not even see".
The Killing Story
Then we reach to the murder itself – and the eponymous day experienced by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his associates. Kraus has excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what transpired when a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, wandering about fixing his automobile and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt develops an obsession by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who gains dimension in part due to the protagonist's connection to her – another bright, bullied girl spiraling out of control in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
