This latest work centers on protagonists chasing after fresh starts, attempting to leave behind drugs or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", transforming it into deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Examples include "He aimed to start over" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the narrative. And yet, the author herself appears to be undertaking her personal new beginning, since this presents as a new kind of book – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. Yet it turns out to be filled with the recurring issues and approaches as earlier books.
From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book
Chris Kraus was originally an visual artist who transitioned to writing unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, structured as epistles to an unresponsive love interest, transforming intimate women's literature from abjection into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the following three fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the impact and rawness that the letter form brought to the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a renegade artist who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It makes sense that she now wants to explore new kinds of material, turning outward to the experiences of others, at a time when she asserts that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing obsolete.
Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, encompassing three generations – each trapped by their backgrounds. There is the narrative about Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, relocating from the New York borough to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband her husband Paul. Finally the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a community mostly forsaken by progressive politics only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.
As a reader drawn to refined literature of the kind the author herself typically rejects, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the initial segment.
As someone who reads drawn to honed writing of the style that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the initial part. It exhibits a fresh level of observation that allows space for small details, like the pail that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the opening of the book, helped by her cherished parent. "I found an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a great plaything", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". She tells the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this new voice could persist to the end. The author states here that she resents the pleasure audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the unpolished style she shares with her idol author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her earlier works returns in the second segment. The protagonist is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a society propelled by the hostility and dread that powers Trump's victory. A significant portion discusses about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her occupation changed from "author" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. At one point she says that she's investigating the murder so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an the United States that her online critics would not understand, would overlook entirely".
The Murder Narrative
So then we come to the homicide in question – and the titular day passed by the victim with the murderer and his friends. The author possesses great source material, and knows hour by hour what happened when the victim Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, loitering getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I found myself captivated by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to go further into her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman derailing in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. This entire part feels strangely incomplete, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
