The Four Spent the Day Together centers on characters seeking clean slates, struggling to escape substance abuse or toxic relationships, only to see hope turn into violence. The author often employs the phrase "new beginning", transforming it into deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He aimed to start over" and "They chose to begin anew" appear throughout the story. Meanwhile, the author herself is embarking on her personal new beginning, because this seems a novel form of writing – observational, authentically narrative. But then it proves to be filled with the familiar conflicts and styles as earlier books.
From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work
Chris Kraus began as an creative who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, elevating personal female narrative from self-debasement into defiance. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels lacked the impact and rawness that the epistolary style imparted to the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a renegade artist who had evolved into a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It makes sense that she currently desires to try out new kinds of material, turning outward to external narratives, at a time when she asserts that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing unnecessary.
Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing multiple eras – none able to break free from their histories. There is the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, moving from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. The third thread involves the story of the murder of one troubled youth by another in a locality long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in rural Minnesota.
For this reader drawn to honed writing of the type Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.
As a reader drawn to precise prose of the variety that Kraus usually avoids, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that allows space for trivial aspects, like the pail that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a nice toy", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms rolling around in their mouths like hard candy". Kraus writes Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was destined to be disappointed when I hoped this different style could last out the book. The author states here that she resents the pleasure audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works comes back in the central part. Catt Greene is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between Minnesota and LA, unable to aid Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a world driven by the rage and anxiety that underpins a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "author" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. On one occasion she says that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she could potentially understand something about an America that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even perceive".
The Murder Narrative
Thus we arrive to the actual killing – and the referenced day passed by the victim with the killer and his companions. The author possesses excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what occurred as a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, loitering having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
Catt develops an obsession by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to go further into her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who gains dimension partially because of Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the point that her narrative ends almost mid-par
