The new book features characters seeking clean slates, struggling to escape drugs or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into violence. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", rendering it deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the text. At the same time, she is embarking on her individual reinvention, since this appears a different type of work – observational, genuinely novelistic. However it proves to be packed with the same dilemmas and approaches as her previous works.
From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book
Chris Kraus started out as an artist who transitioned to writing unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating intimate women's literature from abjection into defiance. She kept producing books, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels missed the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style infused into the voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her role as a maverick maker who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It makes sense that she currently desires to experiment with new kinds of material, looking outwards to external narratives, at a moment when she asserts that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing obsolete.
Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering multiple eras – none able to break free from their histories. We encounter the narrative about Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, moving from the Bronx to a pastoral setting. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a community largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from the protagonist's home in rural Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader drawn to polished prose of the kind Kraus tends to eschew, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the opening part.
Being a reader who favors precise prose of the kind that the author usually avoids, I was won over by the novelistic voice of the first section. There is a novel degree of detail that makes room for minutiae, like the pail that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a great plaything", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words rolling around in their mouths like hard candy". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this different style could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she resents the enjoyment those who appreciate polished prose have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to disruption, to the unpolished style she shares with her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her earlier works reasserts itself in the middle section. The protagonist is working on refurbishing three dozen dilapidated units in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help her husband control his drinking. She feels helpless as her spouse moves between low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a world driven by the anger and fear that underpins Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on social media, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. On one occasion she states that she's looking into the killing 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 Homicide Account
So then we come to the murder itself – and the referenced day experienced by the deceased with the perpetrator and his friends. Kraus utilizes great source material, and knows hour by hour what happened 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 appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, wandering about fixing his automobile and funding treats and narcotics, before being murdered by her romantic interest Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has often been institutionalized for aggressive outbursts.
Obsession and Unfinished Business
The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and reckless transgression tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who comes alive partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
