The new book features characters chasing after new beginnings, trying to break free from drugs or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into conflict. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", making it willfully cynical through recurring use. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the story. Meanwhile, the author herself is embarking on her personal new beginning, since this presents as a different type of work – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. But then it reveals itself to be laden with the recurring issues and aesthetics as past novels.
From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic
The writer started out as an artist who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as missives to a distant beloved, transforming intimate women's literature from abjection into rebellion. She continued writing, but the following three compelling and abrasive novels lacked the power and directness that the epistolary style imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her role as a nonconformist creator who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It makes sense that she now wants to try out new kinds of material, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a moment when she states that current political era renders personal narrative obsolete.
Three Generations, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, encompassing several time periods – all unable to escape their histories. The book includes the narrative about Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, relocating from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. There is the narrative of the author, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction a man named Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a locality largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.
From my perspective as a reader fond of honed writing of the kind the author herself often avoids, I was captivated by the narrative style of the opening part.
As someone who reads who appreciates honed writing of the kind that Kraus tends to eschew, I was won over by the literary tone of the first section. There is a fresh level of observation that accommodates trivial aspects, like the pail that the young Catt frees from the ice at the start of the story, helped by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words rolling around 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 precisely her dream."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was fated to feel let down when I expected this fresh tone could persist to the end. The author states here that she is annoyed by the pleasure readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the unpolished style she echoes from her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels comes back in the second segment. Catt Greene is working on refurbishing multiple decrepit residences in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between two different states, unable to aid Paul manage his alcohol use. She experiences powerlessness as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a environment propelled by the anger and fear that powers Trump's victory. A significant portion discusses about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. At one point she remarks that she's investigating the murder so that before departing the state, "she could potentially understand something about an the nation that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would overlook entirely".
The Murder Narrative
Then we reach to the murder itself – and the eponymous day experienced by the deceased with the perpetrator and his friends. The author possesses great source material, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after connecting via an application where she offered adult photos. He sought a sexual encounter but seems affably to have spent the day with her companions, loitering having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.
Obsession and Unfinished Business
Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to explore more thoroughly her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who comes alive partially because of Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par
