🔗 Share this article

This latest work is populated with characters chasing after fresh starts, attempting to leave behind drugs or harmful partnerships, only to see hope turn into violence. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", making it deliberately jaded through recurring use. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" recur in the story. At the same time, she appears to be undertaking her individual reinvention, because this presents as a different type of work – observational, authentically narrative. However it proves to be laden with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as her previous works.

From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work

Chris Kraus was originally an creative who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating confessional female writing from self-debasement into assassination. She continued writing, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the impact and rawness that the letter form infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a renegade artist who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It follows that she now wants to try out new kinds of material, turning outward to the experiences of others, at a period in which she asserts that current political era turns intimate literature redundant.

Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing several time periods – each trapped by their backgrounds. We encounter the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, moving from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband a man named Paul. Finally the story of the murder of one troubled youth by another in a locality largely deserted by liberal ideals only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader attracted to refined literature of the kind Kraus typically rejects, I was seduced by the literary tone of the first section.

As someone who reads drawn to crafted language of the style that the author often disregards, I was captivated by the storytelling approach of the initial part. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates minutiae, like the container that the young Catt dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her adored dad. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she exclaims; "a great plaything", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". The author narrates the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was destined to be disappointed when I wished this different style could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the pleasure audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she has in common with her inspiration Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels returns in the second segment. Catt is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting Paul manage his alcohol use. She feels helpless as her spouse cycles through low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a environment fueled by the anger and fear that underpins Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her occupation changed from "novelist" to "landlord" on the online encyclopedia. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. At one point she says that she's looking into the killing so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would not even see".

The Killing Story

Then we reach to the murder itself – and the titular day spent by the deceased with the killer and his friends. The author possesses excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what transpired when a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day with her companions, mooching around getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

Catt develops an obsession by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partially because of Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman derailing in a struggling, neglected community. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par