🔗 Share this article

This latest work features individuals seeking clean slates, attempting to leave behind substance abuse or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Kraus often employs the phrase "new beginning", making it deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" recur in the text. Meanwhile, Kraus herself appears to be undertaking her personal new beginning, as this seems a new kind of book – documentarian, authentically narrative. Yet it reveals itself to be packed with the recurring issues and styles as her previous works.

From Accidental Writer to Iconic Work

Chris Kraus started out as an creative who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting personal female narrative from abjection into defiance. She kept producing books, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the letter form infused into the voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a maverick maker who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It makes sense that she now wants to experiment with fresh narrative sources, directing her gaze to other people's stories, at a moment when she states that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing redundant.

Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing multiple eras – all unable to escape their histories. There is the tale of Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, transitioning from the New York borough to a pastoral setting. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a town long abandoned by progressive politics only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.

From my perspective as a reader drawn to honed writing of the type the author herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the literary tone of the opening part.

As a reader who favors crafted language of the variety that the author often disregards, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for small details, like the container that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the opening of the book, assisted by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". The author narrates Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "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 wished this fresh tone could continue through the novel. The author states here that she resents the satisfaction those who appreciate polished prose have gotten from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her hero Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books returns in the central part. Catt is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between Minnesota and LA, unable to aid Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a world fueled by the anger and fear that underpins an electoral success. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on social media, her listed profession modified from "writer" to "real estate holder" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. In a moment she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would overlook entirely".

The Murder Narrative

Thus we arrive to the homicide in question – and the referenced day experienced by the victim with the perpetrator and his companions. The author possesses excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when the victim Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He sought a sexual encounter but seems amiably to have occupied the day with her companions, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has often been institutionalized for aggressive outbursts.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt develops an obsession by the story, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and reckless transgression tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who comes alive partially because of the protagonist's connection to her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels oddly unfinished, to the point that her narrative ends almost mid-par