This latest work centers on characters pursuing new beginnings, struggling to escape drugs or toxic relationships, only to see hope turn into violence. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", making it deliberately jaded through recurring use. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the story. Meanwhile, Kraus herself seems to be making her own fresh start, as this appears a new kind of book – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. Yet it turns out to be filled with the same dilemmas and styles as earlier books.
From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic
The writer began as an visual artist who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, structured as missives to a distant beloved, converting confessional female writing from self-debasement into rebellion. She continued writing, but the following three fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the shock and immediacy 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 considerable focus on property transactions. It follows that she now wants to explore fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to external narratives, at a time when she claims that current political era turns intimate literature obsolete.
Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering several time periods – all unable to escape their pasts. There is the narrative about Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, transitioning from the New York borough to a pastoral setting. Additionally the narrative of the author, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one troubled youth by another in a locality mostly forsaken by liberal ideals only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader drawn to honed writing of the type Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.
As someone who reads drawn to precise prose of the kind that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the literary tone of the opening segment. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates minutiae, like the bucket that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the opening of the book, helped by her adored dad. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a nice toy", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language rolling around in their mouths like hard candy". She tells the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."
Frustration and Disruption
I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this new voice could continue through the novel. Kraus notes here that she resents the pleasure readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her idol author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her past books reasserts itself in the middle section. The protagonist is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help her husband curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul transitions between low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a environment propelled by the hostility and dread that underpins a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on a platform, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she states that she's investigating the murder so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".
The Killing Story
So then we come to the actual killing – and the eponymous day passed by the deceased with the killer and his associates. Kraus utilizes excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day in the company of her associates, wandering about getting his car mended and funding treats and narcotics, before being murdered 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 develops an obsession by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and reckless transgression clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who comes alive partially because of the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
