🔗 Share this article

This latest work centers on individuals chasing after fresh starts, trying to break free from addictions or toxic relationships, only to witness hope devolve into violence. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", making it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He aimed to start over" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the narrative. And yet, she is embarking on her own fresh start, since this seems a different type of work – documentarian, authentically narrative. But then it proves to be packed with the recurring issues and approaches as past novels.

From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work

The writer was originally an creative who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating intimate women's literature from abjection into defiance. She kept producing books, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the impact and rawness that the correspondence format brought to the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a renegade artist who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It makes sense that she presently aims to explore different types of content, turning outward to other people's stories, at a period in which she asserts that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature redundant.

Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, encompassing several time periods – all unable to escape their histories. The book includes the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, transitioning from the urban environment to a pastoral setting. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. Finally the story of the murder of one troubled youth by another in a community long abandoned by liberal ideals only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.

As a reader drawn to polished prose of the sort Kraus typically rejects, I was seduced by the narrative style of the opening part.

As a reader who appreciates honed writing of the kind that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was won over by the literary tone of the opening segment. It possesses a fresh level of observation that allows space for minutiae, like the container that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like piece candy". She tells Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was fated to feel let down when I expected this fresh tone could continue through the novel. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the pleasure audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she has in common with her hero Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books comes back in the central part. Catt Greene is working on refurbishing multiple decrepit residences in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid Paul control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a environment propelled by the anger and fear that underpins Trump's victory. A significant portion discusses about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "landlord" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to be overly concerned about this. In a moment she states that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would be unable to grasp, would overlook entirely".

The Killing Story

So then we come to the homicide in question – and the titular day experienced by the murdered individual with the murderer and his associates. Kraus has excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what transpired when Brandon came to meet 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 in the company of her associates, loitering having his vehicle repaired and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

Catt develops an obsession by the story, and I found myself captivated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to go further into her own obsessions here. The standout figure 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 notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par