🔗 Share this article

This latest work is populated with protagonists pursuing new beginnings, attempting to leave behind drugs or harmful partnerships, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", making it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the story. At the same time, the author herself appears to be undertaking her personal new beginning, because this presents as a new kind of book – documentarian, authentically narrative. Yet it proves to be filled with the familiar conflicts and approaches as past novels.

From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book

Chris Kraus was originally an creative who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, converting confessional female writing from self-debasement into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels lacked the power and directness that the epistolary style infused into the voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a renegade artist who had become a major property owner, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It is logical that she presently aims to experiment with new kinds of material, directing her gaze to other people's stories, at a moment when she claims that contemporary political climate turns intimate literature obsolete.

Three Generations, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering three generations – all unable to escape their backgrounds. We encounter the story of characters Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, relocating from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a community long abandoned by progressive politics only 80 miles from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.

For this reader attracted to honed writing of the sort Kraus tends to eschew, I was captivated by the literary tone of the initial segment.

Being a reader who favors crafted language of the kind that Kraus tends to eschew, I was won over by the literary tone of the first section. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that accommodates minutiae, like the pail that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the opening of the book, aided by her adored dad. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a great plaything", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like hard candy". The author narrates the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was fated to feel let down when I wished this fresh tone could continue through the novel. Kraus says here that she dislikes the satisfaction audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the unpolished style she has in common with her hero Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books reasserts itself in the central part. Catt Greene is working on refurbishing multiple decrepit residences in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a environment driven by the anger and fear that drives a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on a platform, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "property owner" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. In a moment she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before exiting the region, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would overlook entirely".

The Murder Narrative

Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the eponymous day experienced by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his associates. Kraus utilizes excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what transpired when Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but seems affably to have spent the day with her companions, wandering about getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to explore more thoroughly her individual preoccupations here. The standout figure is Brittney, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par