The Four Spent the Day Together is full of people seeking fresh starts, attempting to give up drugs or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into violence. Chris Kraus uses the phrase a lot, making it wilfully jaded in its repetitions. “He could make a fresh start.” “They decided to make a fresh start.” And all along, here she is, making her own fresh start, because this seems a new kind of book – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. But then it turns out to be packed with the same dilemmas and styles as the old ones.
Kraus is an artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, comprised of letters to an unreceptive lover, turning confessional female writing from abjection into assassination. She carried on writing, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the shock and immediacy the letter form brought to the voice of I Love Dick. It didn’t help that she was a renegade artist who’d become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was a lot about real estate deals. It makes sense that she now wants to try out new kinds of material, looking outwards to other people’s stories, at a time when she says Trumpian politics makes confessional writing redundant.
