The new book features protagonists seeking clean slates, struggling to escape addictions or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into conflict. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", rendering it willfully cynical through recurring use. Phrases such as "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the narrative. And yet, Kraus herself is embarking on her own fresh start, as this appears a new kind of book – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. Yet it turns out to be laden with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as her previous works.
From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book
Chris Kraus started out as an visual artist who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, converting confessional female writing from humiliation into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the letter form imparted to the voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a nonconformist creator who had evolved into a major property owner, so there was much discussion on real estate deals. It follows that she presently aims to try out fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to external narratives, at a period in which she asserts that current political era turns intimate literature redundant.
Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing multiple eras – none able to break free from their backgrounds. There is the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, relocating from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. Then there is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a locality mostly forsaken by liberal ideals only 80 miles from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.
For this reader attracted to refined literature of the type the author herself often avoids, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.
As a reader who appreciates precise prose of the style that Kraus tends to eschew, I was captivated by the literary tone of the initial part. There is a novel degree of detail that allows space for minutiae, like the bucket that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her cherished parent. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like sweet treats". The author narrates Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not entirely her own."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was destined to be disappointed when I hoped this different style could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the pleasure audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she echoes from her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works returns in the central part. Catt Greene is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between two different states, unable to aid her husband manage his alcohol use. She experiences powerlessness as her spouse cycles through underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a environment fueled by the hostility and dread that powers Trump's victory. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her occupation changed from "novelist" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. On one occasion she remarks that she's investigating the murder so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an America that her social media opponents would not understand, would overlook entirely".
The Killing Story
Then we reach to the actual killing – and the referenced day spent by the deceased with the killer and his companions. Kraus has great source material, and details moment by moment what occurred as Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, mooching around getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing clash in this segment. Yet I wished her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The standout figure is Brittney herself, who gains dimension partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
