🔗 Share this article

The new book centers on individuals seeking fresh starts, trying to break free from addictions or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into conflict. Kraus frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", rendering it willfully cynical through recurring use. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" recur in the text. And yet, she appears to be undertaking her own fresh start, as this presents as a new kind of book – observational, authentically narrative. Yet it turns out to be filled with the same dilemmas and approaches as past novels.

From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book

Chris Kraus was originally an visual artist who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting personal female narrative from self-debasement into defiance. She continued writing, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels lacked the impact and rawness that the correspondence format infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a renegade artist who had evolved into a major property owner, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It follows that she now wants to try out fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to external narratives, at a period in which she claims that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative redundant.

Three Generations, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, encompassing multiple eras – each trapped by their backgrounds. There is the story of characters Emma and Jasper, versions of the author's parents, moving from the urban environment to a pastoral setting. There is the narrative of the author, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband a man named Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one directionless individual by another in a locality largely deserted by liberal ideals only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader drawn to honed writing of the type Kraus tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the first section.

As someone who reads who favors precise prose of the kind that Kraus tends to eschew, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the initial part. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for minutiae, like the container that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her adored dad. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a nice toy", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". She tells the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not entirely her own."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this new voice could continue through the novel. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the pleasure audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her past books reasserts itself 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, failing to help her husband manage his alcohol use. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a world driven by the rage and anxiety that powers an electoral success. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her occupation changed from "writer" to "landlord" on a reference site. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. At one point she says that she's investigating the murder so that before exiting the region, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her online critics would not understand, would overlook entirely".

The Killing Story

Thus we arrive to the actual killing – and the eponymous day spent by the victim with the murderer and his associates. Kraus utilizes great source material, and reconstructs step by step what occurred as a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she offered adult photos. He was hoping for sex but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, loitering having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

Catt develops an obsession by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to go further into her own obsessions here. The standout figure is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partly through Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the extent that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par