"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. The Four Spent the Day Together is in three parts, straddling three generations all unable to escape their pasts. There's the story of Emma and Jasper, versions of Kraus's parents, moving from the Bronx to rural Connecticut."
The Four Spent the Day Together unfolds in three parts across three generations, centering on characters unable to escape their pasts. Emma and Jasper move from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. Catt Greene navigates belated fame, Trump-era politics, and an addict husband. A murder between two young men surfaces in a town abandoned by progressive politics near rural Minnesota. Repeated invocations of 'fresh start' highlight attempts at renewal that deteriorate into violence. The narrative traces Kraus's evolution from confessional letters to outward-looking material, intersecting themes of addiction, real-estate entanglement, political disillusionment, and the persistence of earlier lives.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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