The Four Spent the Day Together features individuals pursuing fresh starts, attempting to leave behind drugs or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", rendering it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the narrative. Meanwhile, the author herself appears to be undertaking her personal new beginning, because this seems a different type of work – observational, genuinely novelistic. But then it reveals itself to be filled with the familiar conflicts and approaches as her previous works.
From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic
The writer was originally an visual artist who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, elevating confessional female writing from abjection into rebellion. She continued writing, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the letter form brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her role as a maverick maker who had evolved into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on real estate deals. It is logical that she presently aims to explore new kinds of material, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a period in which she claims that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing redundant.
Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering several time periods – none able to break free from their pasts. We encounter the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, moving from the New York borough to the Connecticut countryside. There is the account of Kraus, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction her husband Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a town mostly forsaken by progressive politics only 80 miles from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.
For this reader fond of honed writing of the kind Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the literary tone of the initial segment.
Being a reader who appreciates precise prose of the style that Kraus herself often disregards, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the initial part. There is a novel degree of detail that accommodates minutiae, like the bucket that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the nuanced interpretations of terms tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". Kraus writes Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not entirely her own."
Frustration and Disruption
I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this new voice could persist to the end. The author states here that she resents the pleasure readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the unpolished style she shares with her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works comes back in the middle section. The protagonist is working on refurbishing three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between two different states, failing to help her husband manage his alcohol use. She experiences powerlessness as her spouse moves between low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a environment fueled by the rage and anxiety that drives an electoral success. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. On one occasion she says that she's investigating the murder so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".
The Homicide Account
Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the eponymous day spent by the victim with the murderer and his companions. Kraus has excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what happened when Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, loitering having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being shot by Brittney's partner Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The standout figure is Brittney herself, who comes alive in part due to Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels oddly unfinished, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par
