The Four Spent the Day Together centers on protagonists chasing after clean slates, trying to break free from drugs or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "fresh start", rendering it willfully cynical through recurring use. Phrases such as "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" recur in the narrative. At the same time, the author herself is embarking on her own fresh start, because this appears a different type of work – observational, truly literary. But then it reveals itself to be packed with the same dilemmas and styles as her previous works.
From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work
The writer began as an visual artist who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, structured as epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating personal female narrative from humiliation into defiance. She kept producing books, but the following three engaging and challenging novels missed the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format brought to the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a nonconformist creator who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on real estate deals. It is logical that she currently desires to experiment with different types of content, turning outward to other people's stories, at a time when she states that current political era makes confessional writing redundant.
Three Generations, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering multiple eras – each trapped by their backgrounds. There is the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, relocating from the New York borough to a pastoral setting. Then there is the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one directionless individual by another in a community mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.
As a reader fond of polished prose of the kind the author herself typically rejects, I was captivated by the narrative style of the initial segment.
As a reader who appreciates crafted language of the style that the author tends to eschew, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the first section. There is a novel degree of detail that accommodates minutiae, like the container that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a nice toy", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms rolling around in their mouths like hard candy". The author narrates Emma's narrative with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was fated to feel let down when I expected this new voice could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she resents the pleasure audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disruption, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her hero author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her past books reasserts itself in the central part. The protagonist is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between Minnesota and LA, unsuccessful in assisting Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as her spouse moves between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a environment fueled by the anger and fear that powers an electoral success. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her listed profession modified from "author" to "real estate holder" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. In a moment she says that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her social media opponents would not understand, would not even perceive".
The Homicide Account
So then we come to the murder itself – and the titular day passed by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his friends. Kraus utilizes compelling foundational content, and knows hour by hour what happened when a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, wandering about fixing his automobile and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.
Fascination and Incompletion
The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and daring boundary-pushing wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partly through Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
