Exploring The Four Spent the Day Together by Chris Kraus – A Cult Writer Ventures Into New Ground

The new book centers on individuals chasing after clean slates, trying to break free from addictions or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into conflict. Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", rendering it deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the narrative. At the same time, she seems to be making her own fresh start, because this appears a novel form of writing – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. However it turns out to be laden with the familiar conflicts and styles as earlier books.

From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book

Kraus started out as an creative who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, elevating personal female narrative from self-debasement into defiance. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the power and directness that the epistolary style brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a nonconformist creator who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It is logical that she now wants to try out new kinds of material, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a time when she states that current political era renders personal narrative unnecessary.

Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering several time periods – all unable to escape their pasts. There is the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, relocating from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. Additionally the narrative of the author, in the guise of Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a community mostly forsaken by progressive politics only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in a remote part of Minnesota.

For this reader drawn to honed writing of the kind Kraus tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the opening part.

Being a reader drawn to precise prose of the kind that Kraus usually avoids, I was seduced by the literary tone of the initial part. There is a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for trivial aspects, like the bucket that the young Catt dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a great plaything", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like sweet treats". Kraus writes Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was fated to feel let down when I wished this new voice could last out the book. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the pleasure readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disruption, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels reasserts itself in the middle section. Catt Greene is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting Paul control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between poorly supported positions as an recovery specialist in a society driven by the anger and fear that underpins an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on social media, her professional designation altered from "author" to "property owner" on a reference site. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she says that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her online critics would not understand, would not even perceive".

The Killing Story

So then we come to the actual killing – and the referenced day passed by the murdered individual with the killer and his associates. Kraus has compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what happened when the victim Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but seems affably to have spent the day in the company of her associates, loitering fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who gains dimension partly through Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par