The Four Spent the Day Together features characters pursuing new beginnings, attempting to leave behind drugs or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", making it deliberately jaded through recurring use. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the narrative. And yet, Kraus herself is embarking on her own fresh start, as this seems a new kind of book – documentarian, truly literary. But then it turns out to be filled with the same dilemmas and approaches as her previous works.
From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic
Chris Kraus was originally an artist who entered the literary world somewhat by chance with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, converting confessional female writing from humiliation into assassination. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style brought to the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a nonconformist creator who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It follows that she currently desires to explore new kinds of material, turning outward to external narratives, at a moment when she claims that current political era makes confessional writing unnecessary.
Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, encompassing multiple eras – each trapped by their pasts. We encounter the story of characters Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, relocating from the Bronx to a pastoral setting. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the guise of protagonist Catt Greene, confronting the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. Finally the story of the murder of one directionless individual by another in a community long abandoned by progressive politics only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.
From my perspective as a reader fond of polished prose of the kind Kraus herself typically rejects, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the opening part.
As someone who reads drawn to precise prose of the kind that the author usually avoids, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the initial part. It possesses a fresh level of observation that makes room for minutiae, like the bucket that the young Catt dislodges from ice at the opening of the book, assisted by her cherished parent. "I found an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a great plaything", he answers, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like sweet treats". She tells the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this different style could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she dislikes the pleasure readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her idol author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works comes back in the second segment. Catt is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while shuttling between two different states, unable to aid Paul manage his alcohol use. She experiences powerlessness as her spouse cycles through low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a society driven by the anger and fear that drives a political win. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she states that she's investigating the murder so that before exiting the region, "she could potentially understand something about an America that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even perceive".
The Murder Narrative
So then we come to the homicide in question – and the titular day experienced by the victim with the murderer and his companions. Kraus has excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what transpired when Brandon came to visit Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He sought a sexual encounter but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for aggressive outbursts.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I found myself captivated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who comes alive partially because of Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
