The Four Spent the Day Together features protagonists seeking clean slates, trying to break free from drugs or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into violence. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", transforming it into willfully cynical through its repetitions. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the story. And yet, Kraus herself seems to be making her personal new beginning, because this presents as a new kind of book – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. Yet it reveals itself to be laden with the same dilemmas and approaches as her previous works.
From Chance Novelist to Iconic Work
Chris Kraus began as an artist who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating intimate women's literature from humiliation into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the power and directness that the epistolary style infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a nonconformist creator who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It follows that she currently desires to experiment with different types of content, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a period in which she states that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing redundant.
Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, spanning three generations – each trapped by their histories. We encounter the tale of Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, transitioning from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. Additionally the narrative of the author, in the guise of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. Finally the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a town mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's cottage in a remote part of Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader fond of polished prose of the kind the author herself often avoids, I was seduced by the narrative style of the opening part.
As someone who reads who favors honed writing of the kind that Kraus often disregards, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the initial part. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that allows space for small details, like the bucket that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a nice toy", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language rolling around in their mouths like sweet treats". Kraus writes the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."
Frustration and Disruption
I was fated to feel let down when I expected this different style could continue through the novel. Kraus says here that she resents the satisfaction those who appreciate polished prose have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels returns in the second segment. The protagonist is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help her husband manage his alcohol use. She feels helpless as Paul moves between poorly supported positions as an addiction therapist in a world driven by the rage and anxiety that powers an electoral success. A significant portion discusses about Catt being cancelled on social media, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she says that she's looking into the killing so that before exiting the region, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would be unable to grasp, would not even see".
The Murder Narrative
So then we come to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day spent by the victim with the perpetrator and his associates. The author possesses great source material, and knows hour by hour what transpired when Brandon came to meet Brittney after connecting via an application where she offered adult photos. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, loitering getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for aggressive outbursts.
Fascination and Incompletion
The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and reckless transgression clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who gains dimension in part due to Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The complete segment feels oddly unfinished, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
