The new book is populated with characters seeking fresh starts, trying to break free from drugs or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into violence. Chris Kraus frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", rendering it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Examples include "He aimed to start over" and "They opted for a clean break" recur in the story. Meanwhile, Kraus herself is embarking on her individual reinvention, because this presents as a different type of work – observational, truly literary. However it proves to be packed with the familiar conflicts and approaches as past novels.
From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic
Chris Kraus was originally an visual artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, elevating intimate women's literature from self-debasement into assassination. She continued writing, but the following three engaging and challenging novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a nonconformist creator who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on housing investments. It follows that she currently desires to try out different types of content, directing her gaze to the experiences of others, at a time when she asserts that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature redundant.
Multiple Generations, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering several time periods – all unable to escape their histories. We encounter the tale of Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, relocating from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of Catt Greene, grappling with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband her husband Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a town mostly forsaken by progressive politics only a short distance from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.
As a reader drawn to polished prose of the kind Kraus herself typically rejects, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the opening part.
As someone who reads who favors crafted language of the kind that Kraus often disregards, I was won over by the literary tone of the initial part. It exhibits a fresh level of observation that accommodates trivial aspects, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the start of the story, assisted by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a nice toy", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling 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 entirely her own."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was fated to feel let down when I hoped this different style could continue through the novel. Kraus says here that she resents the satisfaction audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she echoes from her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels reasserts itself in the second segment. The protagonist is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid her husband control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul transitions between low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a environment driven by the hostility and dread that powers Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "author" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. In a moment she says that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she could potentially understand something about an America that her Twitter detractors would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".
The Murder Narrative
So then we come to the actual killing – and the referenced day spent by the deceased with the killer and his associates. Kraus utilizes great source material, and knows hour by hour what occurred as a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she offered adult photos. He sought a sexual encounter but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, loitering fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by her romantic interest Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.
Fascination and Incompletion
The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partially because of Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the point that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
