The Four Spent the Day Together centers on characters chasing after clean slates, attempting to leave behind addictions or harmful partnerships, only to see hope turn into conflict. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "new beginning", rendering it willfully cynical through recurring use. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the text. At the same time, the author herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, as this appears a new kind of book – observational, truly literary. But then it turns out to be packed with the familiar conflicts and styles as past novels.
From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book
The writer began as an creative who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, transforming confessional female writing from abjection into rebellion. She continued writing, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the power and directness that the epistolary style infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a renegade artist who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on housing investments. It follows that she presently aims to try out fresh narrative sources, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a moment when she claims that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative redundant.
Several Eras, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning three generations – all unable to escape their histories. There is the story of characters Emma and Jasper, versions of Kraus's parents, transitioning from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of Catt Greene, grappling with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one directionless individual by another in a town long abandoned by progressive politics only a short distance from Catt's cottage in a remote part of Minnesota.
For this reader drawn to honed writing of the type Kraus tends to eschew, I was seduced by the narrative style of the initial segment.
Being a reader who favors precise prose of the variety that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the initial part. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for small details, like the container that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the opening of the book, aided by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a lovely toy", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". She tells Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this fresh tone could continue through the novel. Kraus notes here that she resents the satisfaction readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disruption, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works reasserts itself in the middle section. The protagonist is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid Paul curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a world propelled by the rage and anxiety that powers an electoral success. A significant portion discusses about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "property owner" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to be overly concerned about this. At one point she remarks that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her online critics would not understand, would not even see".
The Killing Story
So then we come to the murder itself – and the eponymous day experienced by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his associates. The author possesses excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what transpired when Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but seems affably to have spent the day with her companions, loitering fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who comes alive partially because of Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels oddly unfinished, to the point that her narrative ends almost mid-par
