🔗 Share this article

This latest work features characters pursuing clean slates, trying to break free from addictions or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into violence. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", making it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the narrative. And yet, Kraus herself appears to be undertaking her own fresh start, as this appears a different type of work – documentarian, truly literary. But then it proves to be filled with the familiar conflicts and approaches as past novels.

From Accidental Writer to Iconic Work

Kraus started out as an creative who transitioned to writing unintentionally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, converting personal female narrative from abjection into defiance. She continued writing, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels lacked the power and directness that the epistolary style imparted to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a renegade artist who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It is logical that she presently aims to try out new kinds of material, directing her gaze to the experiences of others, at a time when she claims that current political era renders personal narrative unnecessary.

Several Eras, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning multiple eras – all unable to escape their histories. The book includes the tale of characters Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, transitioning from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. There is the narrative of the author, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a town long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.

As a reader fond of polished prose of the type the author herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the narrative style of the opening part.

Being a reader who favors precise prose of the variety that Kraus tends to eschew, I was won over by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates minutiae, like the bucket that the young Catt dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a great plaything", he answers, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". The author narrates Emma's narrative with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."

Frustration and Disruption

I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this new voice could last out the book. Kraus says here that she dislikes the satisfaction readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the unpolished style she has in common with her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels reasserts itself in the second segment. Catt is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting Paul manage his alcohol use. She is overwhelmed as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a world propelled by the anger and fear that underpins a political win. A significant portion discusses about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "landlord" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to be overly concerned about this. At one point she remarks 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 not understand, would not even see".

The Murder Narrative

Thus we arrive to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day experienced by the victim with the perpetrator and his associates. Kraus utilizes great source material, and knows hour by hour what happened when Brandon came to visit Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, loitering getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by her romantic interest Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who comes alive partly through Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par