The Four Spent the Day Together features individuals chasing after fresh starts, attempting to leave behind drugs or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into violence. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", rendering it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the text. Meanwhile, the author herself seems to be making her personal new beginning, because this seems a different type of work – fact-based, authentically narrative. But then it turns out to be filled with the recurring issues and approaches as earlier books.
From Accidental Writer to Iconic Work
Chris Kraus was originally an creative who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, converting intimate women's literature from abjection into defiance. She kept producing books, but the following three engaging and challenging novels lacked the impact and rawness that the correspondence format imparted to the voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a maverick maker who had evolved into a extensive real estate holder, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It makes sense that she now wants to experiment with fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to external narratives, at a time when she claims that Trumpian politics renders personal narrative redundant.
Several Eras, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering three generations – all unable to escape their histories. The book includes the narrative about Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, moving from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the character of Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband her husband Paul. Finally the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a community mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.
From my perspective as a reader drawn to honed writing of the sort the author herself typically rejects, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the first section.
As a reader who favors precise prose of the kind that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was captivated by the literary tone of the initial part. It exhibits a fresh level of observation that allows space for minutiae, like the bucket that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a great plaything", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". The author narrates Emma's narrative with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this fresh tone could continue through the novel. Kraus notes here that she resents the pleasure audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the unpolished style she has in common with her hero author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels comes back in the second segment. Catt Greene is attempting to do up multiple decrepit residences in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a society driven by the anger and fear that underpins an electoral success. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her professional designation altered from "author" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she says that she's investigating the murder so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would fail to comprehend, would not even perceive".
The Homicide Account
Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the eponymous day experienced by the deceased with the murderer and his friends. Kraus has great source material, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when 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 alongside her friends, wandering about fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by Brittney's partner Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I found myself captivated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
