The new book features characters chasing after clean slates, struggling to escape drugs or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into conflict. Chris Kraus frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into intentionally weary through recurring use. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the narrative. And yet, the author herself is embarking on her individual reinvention, since this presents as a new kind of book – observational, truly literary. Yet it proves to be laden with the recurring issues and aesthetics as earlier books.
From Accidental Writer to Iconic Work
The writer began as an creative who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as epistles to an unresponsive love interest, transforming personal female narrative from abjection into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the following three compelling and abrasive novels missed the shock and immediacy that the letter form imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a renegade artist who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It follows that she now wants to explore fresh narrative sources, turning outward to external narratives, at a period in which she asserts that Trumpian politics renders personal narrative unnecessary.
Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing several time periods – none able to break free from their pasts. We encounter the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, versions of Kraus's parents, relocating from the New York borough to a pastoral setting. Additionally the narrative of the author, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a town largely deserted by liberal ideals only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.
As a reader drawn to refined literature of the type Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the narrative style of the initial segment.
Being a reader drawn to precise prose of the style that Kraus herself often disregards, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. It possesses a novel degree of detail that accommodates small details, like the pail that the young Catt dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a nice toy", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like sweet treats". Kraus writes Emma's story with interest and closeness. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was destined to be disappointed when I hoped this fresh tone could continue through the novel. The author states here that she resents the enjoyment those who appreciate polished prose have derived from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her idol Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works returns in the middle section. Catt Greene is working on refurbishing three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a world propelled by the hostility and dread that underpins an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on a platform, her listed profession modified from "writer" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she could potentially understand something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even perceive".
The Homicide Account
So then we come to the actual killing – and the eponymous day passed by the deceased with the killer and his companions. Kraus has excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what occurred as Brandon came to visit Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day with her companions, wandering about fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt develops an obsession by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. Yet I wished her to go further into her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl spiraling out of control in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
