The Four Spent the Day Together features protagonists pursuing clean slates, struggling to escape addictions or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into violence. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", rendering it deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the text. At the same time, Kraus herself is embarking on her individual reinvention, since this appears a new kind of book – fact-based, truly literary. However it proves to be filled with the familiar conflicts and approaches as her previous works.
From Chance Novelist to Iconic Work
Chris Kraus started out as an creative who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, transforming confessional female writing from abjection into defiance. She continued writing, but the following three engaging and challenging novels missed the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format infused into the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her role as a renegade artist who had evolved into a major property owner, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It follows that she currently desires to explore new kinds of material, directing her gaze to the experiences of others, at a period in which she states that Trumpian politics makes confessional writing obsolete.
Several Eras, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering multiple eras – none able to break free from their backgrounds. The book includes the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, transitioning from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a community long abandoned by liberal ideals only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.
As a reader drawn to polished prose of the kind Kraus often avoids, I was seduced by the literary tone of the first section.
Being a reader drawn to honed writing of the style that Kraus often disregards, I was won over by the literary tone of the first section. It possesses a fresh level of observation that makes room for trivial aspects, like the container that the protagonist as a child dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a great plaything", he replies, "the nuanced interpretations of terms tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". She tells Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this new voice could persist to the end. The author states here that she is annoyed by the pleasure those who appreciate polished prose have gotten from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she has in common with her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her earlier works comes back in the second segment. Catt Greene is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a world fueled by the hostility and dread that underpins Trump's victory. A significant portion discusses about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her social media opponents would fail to comprehend, would overlook entirely".
The Killing Story
So then we come to the homicide in question – and the titular day experienced by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his companions. Kraus has excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what happened when the victim Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt develops an obsession by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who comes alive partially because of the protagonist's connection to her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels oddly unfinished, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
