The new book features characters chasing after fresh starts, trying to break free from drugs or harmful partnerships, only to witness hope devolve into violence. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", making it deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the text. And yet, the author herself seems to be making her own fresh start, since this presents as a new kind of book – documentarian, authentically narrative. But then it proves to be filled with the same dilemmas and styles as her previous works.
From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book
Chris Kraus started out as an artist who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as missives to a distant beloved, transforming intimate women's literature from abjection into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels did not possess the impact and rawness that the epistolary style brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her role as a renegade artist who had evolved into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on housing investments. It follows that she presently aims to explore new kinds of material, turning outward to the experiences of others, at a period in which she claims that current political era makes confessional writing unnecessary.
Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering several time periods – all unable to escape their pasts. We encounter the story of characters Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, relocating from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. There is the narrative of the author, in the guise of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a community long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.
As a reader fond of refined literature of the kind the author herself typically rejects, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.
As a reader who appreciates precise prose of the variety that the author tends to eschew, I was won over by the novelistic voice of the first section. There is a novel degree of detail that makes room for small details, like the bucket that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the start of the story, helped by her cherished parent. "I found an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a nice toy", he replies, "the nuanced interpretations of terms tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". Kraus writes the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not entirely her own."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this different style could continue through the novel. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the satisfaction audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her inspiration Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her earlier works reasserts itself in the middle section. Catt is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as her spouse cycles through underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a environment fueled by the hostility and dread that underpins a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her occupation changed from "writer" to "property owner" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she states that she's looking into the killing so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn something about an America that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would not even see".
The Killing Story
Then we reach to the murder itself – and the referenced day experienced by the victim with the killer and his friends. Kraus has great source material, and details moment by moment what happened when the victim Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being shot by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has repeatedly received inpatient care for aggressive outbursts.
Obsession and Unfinished Business
Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partly through Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she fails to enact these dialogues. This entire part feels oddly unfinished, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par
