This latest work is populated with individuals chasing after fresh starts, struggling to escape drugs or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into conflict. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "fresh start", transforming it into deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the story. Meanwhile, she seems to be making her individual reinvention, because this presents as a different type of work – documentarian, truly literary. But then it reveals itself to be packed with the recurring issues and styles as past novels.
From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work
Kraus began as an visual artist who entered the literary world somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, transforming confessional female writing from abjection into defiance. She kept producing books, but the following three fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format imparted to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a renegade artist who had turned into a major property owner, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It makes sense that she presently aims to experiment with different types of content, turning outward to external narratives, at a period in which she asserts that contemporary political climate turns intimate literature unnecessary.
Multiple 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 pasts. The book includes the tale of characters Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, transitioning from the New York borough to the Connecticut countryside. There is the account of Kraus, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband her husband Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a locality largely deserted by liberal ideals only 80 miles from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader attracted to refined literature of the kind Kraus tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the initial segment.
As a reader who favors honed writing of the kind that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. It possesses a novel degree of detail that accommodates trivial aspects, like the pail that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the opening of the book, helped by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a great plaything", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words rolling around in their mouths like sweet treats". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this different style could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she has in common with her hero author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works returns in the middle section. The protagonist is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a society fueled by the hostility and dread that powers a political win. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. On one occasion she says 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 not understand, would not even perceive".
The Murder Narrative
Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the titular day passed by the deceased with the murderer and his associates. Kraus has great source material, and knows hour by hour what transpired when a man named 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 with her companions, wandering about fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for aggressive outbursts.
Fascination and Incompletion
The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through the protagonist's connection to her – another bright, bullied girl spiraling out of control in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The complete segment feels oddly unfinished, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par