🔗 Share this article

This latest work features individuals chasing after fresh starts, struggling to escape addictions or harmful partnerships, only to witness hope devolve into conflict. The author often employs the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the narrative. Meanwhile, Kraus herself seems to be making her personal new beginning, because this appears a new kind of book – observational, genuinely novelistic. Yet it proves to be laden with the recurring issues and styles as earlier books.

From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic

Chris Kraus began as an creative who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, converting personal female narrative from self-debasement into assassination. She kept producing books, but the following three engaging and challenging novels lacked the impact and rawness that the letter form brought to the voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her position as a nonconformist creator who had become a major property owner, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It is logical that she now wants to experiment with new kinds of material, looking outwards to external narratives, at a period in which she states that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative obsolete.

Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning several time periods – each trapped by their histories. We encounter the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, moving from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. There is the account of Kraus, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a locality largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.

For this reader drawn to refined literature of the type Kraus herself often avoids, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the first section.

As someone who reads who favors honed writing of the kind that Kraus herself often disregards, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the initial part. There is a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for small details, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he answers, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like hard candy". The author narrates Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."

Frustration and Disruption

I was fated to feel let down when I wished this fresh tone could persist to the end. The author states here that she resents the enjoyment audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she has in common with her hero author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her past books returns in the central part. Catt is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between two different states, failing to help Paul control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as Paul cycles through underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a society propelled by the anger and fear that powers a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on social media, her listed profession modified from "author" to "landlord" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. At one point she states that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her online critics would not understand, would not even perceive".

The Homicide Account

Thus we arrive to the homicide in question – and the titular day experienced by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his friends. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and knows hour by hour what transpired when a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He sought a sexual encounter but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, wandering about fixing his automobile and funding treats and narcotics, before being murdered by her romantic interest Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who gains dimension in part due to the protagonist's connection to her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the point that her narrative ends almost mid-par