🔗 Share this article

The new book features characters chasing after new beginnings, attempting to leave behind substance abuse or toxic relationships, only to see hope turn into violence. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", making it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the story. And yet, Kraus herself appears to be undertaking her personal new beginning, because this seems a different type of work – documentarian, truly literary. Yet it proves to be filled with the familiar conflicts and approaches as past novels.

From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book

The writer began as an visual artist who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, transforming confessional female writing from abjection into defiance. She continued writing, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the impact and rawness that the letter form infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a renegade artist who had evolved into a extensive real estate holder, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It follows that she presently aims to experiment with fresh narrative sources, turning outward to external narratives, at a time when she asserts that Trumpian politics makes confessional writing redundant.

Several Eras, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering several time periods – all unable to escape their histories. The book includes the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, moving from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. Additionally the narrative of the author, in the character of Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a community mostly forsaken by liberal ideals only 80 miles from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.

As a reader attracted to refined literature of the kind the author herself often avoids, I was captivated by the literary tone of the first section.

As someone who reads who appreciates honed writing of the variety that Kraus often disregards, I was won over by the literary tone of the initial part. There is a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates trivial aspects, like the container that the protagonist as a child dislodges from ice at the start of the story, helped by her cherished parent. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like piece candy". Kraus writes the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was fated to feel let down when I hoped this fresh tone could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she resents the pleasure audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disruption, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels returns in the middle section. Catt is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between two different states, unsuccessful in assisting Paul control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul moves between poorly supported positions as an recovery specialist in a world propelled by the anger and fear that drives Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "real estate holder" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she remarks that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her online critics would not understand, would overlook entirely".

The Homicide Account

Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the eponymous day experienced by the deceased with the murderer and his companions. Kraus utilizes great source material, and reconstructs step by step what occurred as the victim Brandon came to visit 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, mooching around fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who gains dimension partly through the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par