Exploring The Four Spent the Day Together by Chris Kraus – An Iconic Writer Attempts New Ground

The new book is populated with individuals chasing after new beginnings, attempting to leave behind drugs or harmful partnerships, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. Kraus often employs the phrase "fresh start", rendering it intentionally weary through its repetitions. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the narrative. Meanwhile, Kraus herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, because this presents as a different type of work – documentarian, truly literary. But then it proves to be laden with the familiar conflicts and styles as past novels.

From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book

Chris Kraus began as an visual artist who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, converting confessional female writing from abjection into assassination. She continued writing, but the following three fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the impact and rawness that the epistolary style infused into the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a renegade artist who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It makes sense that she currently desires to try out fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a moment when she claims that Trumpian politics renders personal narrative obsolete.

Three Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering several time periods – none able to break free from their histories. There is the story of characters Emma and Jasper, representations of Kraus's parents, transitioning from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. Additionally the narrative of the author, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a town long abandoned by liberal ideals only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.

As a reader fond of refined literature of the kind Kraus tends to eschew, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.

As someone who reads who appreciates crafted language of the style that Kraus usually avoids, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for minutiae, like the pail that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her adored dad. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a nice toy", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this different style could continue through the novel. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the enjoyment readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she has in common with her hero author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels returns in the central part. Catt Greene is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while moving between Minnesota and LA, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between underfunded jobs as an substance abuse counselor in a society fueled by the rage and anxiety that drives an electoral success. A significant portion discusses about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her occupation changed from "author" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she states that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she might be able to learn something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would fail to comprehend, would not even see".

The Homicide Account

So then we come to the homicide in question – and the referenced day passed by the victim with the killer and his companions. Kraus utilizes compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what happened when the victim Brandon came to see Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, loitering getting his car mended and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who comes alive partly through Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the point that her narrative ends almost mid-par