This latest work features individuals pursuing new beginnings, struggling to escape drugs or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into violence. The author often employs the phrase "fresh start", making it intentionally weary through its repetitions. Examples include "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the text. And yet, Kraus herself appears to be undertaking her individual reinvention, because this presents as a new kind of book – documentarian, truly literary. However it turns out to be filled with the familiar conflicts and approaches as earlier books.
From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic
Chris Kraus started out as an visual artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, converting confessional female writing from abjection into defiance. She kept producing books, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels lacked the power and directness that the epistolary style brought to the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a renegade artist who had turned into a major property owner, so there was significant attention on housing investments. It makes sense that she now wants to experiment with fresh narrative sources, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a period in which she asserts that current political era turns intimate literature redundant.
Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning several time periods – none able to break free from their histories. There is the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, relocating from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. Additionally the narrative of the author, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. Finally the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a town mostly forsaken by progressive politics only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.
As a reader attracted to honed writing of the kind Kraus tends to eschew, I was captivated by the narrative style of the first section.
As a reader who appreciates precise prose of the kind that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the first section. It possesses a fresh level of observation that allows space for minutiae, like the pail that the young Catt dislodges from ice at the start of the story, helped by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a nice toy", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like sweet treats". Kraus writes Emma's story with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was fated to feel let down when I hoped this fresh tone could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the pleasure audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she has in common with her idol author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books reasserts itself in the second segment. Catt is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between two different states, unsuccessful in assisting Paul manage his alcohol use. She feels helpless as Paul transitions between poorly supported positions as an substance abuse counselor in a world driven by the hostility and dread that powers a political win. A significant portion discusses about Catt's social media ostracism on social media, her listed profession modified from "author" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. On one occasion she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she could potentially understand something about an the nation that her social media opponents would be unable to grasp, would overlook entirely".
The Killing Story
Thus we arrive to the actual killing – and the referenced day passed by the victim with the perpetrator and his companions. Kraus has compelling foundational content, and knows hour by hour what happened when a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day with her companions, loitering getting his car mended 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 repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt develops an obsession by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who comes alive in part due to the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. The author informs us that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
