This latest work is populated with protagonists chasing after clean slates, trying to break free from substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", rendering it willfully cynical through recurring use. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They opted for a clean break" recur in the text. At the same time, she seems to be making her own fresh start, since this seems a different type of work – observational, truly literary. However it turns out to be filled with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as past novels.
From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic
Chris Kraus started out as an visual artist who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as epistles to an unresponsive love interest, transforming intimate women's literature 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 correspondence format infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her role as a maverick maker who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It makes sense that she presently aims to try out fresh narrative sources, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a moment when she claims that Trumpian politics renders personal narrative redundant.
Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning multiple eras – each trapped by their backgrounds. The book includes the story of Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, transitioning from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of Catt Greene, confronting the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a locality long abandoned by progressive politics only 80 miles from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.
As a reader attracted to refined literature of the sort the author herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the first section.
As someone who reads drawn to precise prose of the variety that the author tends to eschew, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the first section. There is a fresh level of observation that makes room for trivial aspects, like the bucket that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the start of the story, aided by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". She tells the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not entirely her own."
Frustration and Disruption
I was destined to be disappointed when I wished this new voice could continue through the novel. The author states here that she dislikes the pleasure readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her hero author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels reasserts itself in the middle section. Catt Greene is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between poorly supported positions as an substance abuse counselor in a environment propelled by the rage and anxiety that drives Trump's victory. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her occupation changed from "writer" to "real estate holder" on a reference site. Kraus still seems 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 could potentially understand something about an the United States that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even perceive".
The Killing Story
Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the referenced day experienced by the victim with the killer and his associates. The author possesses excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what transpired when Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but seems affably to have spent the day with her companions, loitering getting his car mended and funding treats and narcotics, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.
Obsession and Unfinished Business
Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to go further into her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who gains dimension in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The complete segment feels oddly unfinished, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
