The Four Spent the Day Together by Chris Kraus – An Iconic Writer Attempts Fresh Territory

The new book centers on characters seeking clean slates, attempting to leave behind addictions or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into conflict. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", rendering it willfully cynical through recurring use. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the text. Meanwhile, Kraus herself seems to be making her personal new beginning, since this presents as a novel form of writing – documentarian, truly literary. However it turns out to be filled with the same dilemmas and approaches as past novels.

From Accidental Writer to Iconic Work

Chris Kraus was originally an artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating personal female narrative from abjection into rebellion. She continued writing, but the following three fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the power and directness that the letter form infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her position as a nonconformist creator who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It follows that she currently desires to try out new kinds of material, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a time when she asserts that current political era makes confessional writing obsolete.

Three Generations, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering multiple eras – each trapped by their backgrounds. The book includes the narrative about Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, moving from the Bronx to a pastoral setting. Then there is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one directionless individual by another in a community mostly forsaken by liberal ideals only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.

As a reader fond of honed writing of the kind Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the first section.

Being a reader who appreciates precise prose of the variety that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the literary tone of the opening segment. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for trivial aspects, like the pail that the young Catt frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her adored dad. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she exclaims; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words rolling around in their mouths like sweet treats". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was fated to feel let down when I hoped this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she resents the satisfaction readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to disruption, to the unpolished style she echoes from her idol Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works comes back in the middle section. Catt Greene is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a society propelled by the anger and fear that underpins an electoral success. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. On one occasion she remarks that she's investigating the murder so that before exiting the region, "she could potentially understand something about an America that her Twitter detractors would be unable to grasp, would overlook entirely".

The Murder Narrative

So then we come to the murder itself – and the eponymous day spent by the murdered individual with the killer and his companions. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and details moment by moment what transpired when the victim Brandon came to see Brittney after connecting via an application where she offered adult photos. He sought a sexual encounter but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, loitering having his vehicle repaired and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par