The Four Spent the Day Together features protagonists chasing after new beginnings, attempting to leave behind drugs or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into conflict. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", transforming it into deliberately jaded through recurring use. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" recur in the story. At the same time, she appears to be undertaking her own fresh start, since this appears a novel form of writing – documentarian, truly literary. However it turns out to be packed with the familiar conflicts and approaches as her previous works.
From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work
Chris Kraus began as an creative who transitioned to writing unintentionally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, converting intimate women's literature from abjection into defiance. She kept producing books, but the following three compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format brought to the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her position as a renegade artist who had evolved into a extensive real estate holder, so there was significant attention on housing investments. It makes sense that she now wants to try out new kinds of material, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a period in which she claims that current political era renders personal narrative redundant.
Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, encompassing three generations – all unable to escape their histories. The book includes the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, versions of the author's parents, transitioning from the New York borough to the Connecticut countryside. There is the account of Kraus, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband a man named Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a community largely deserted by progressive politics only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.
For this reader drawn to honed writing of the sort the author herself typically rejects, I was captivated by the literary tone of the opening part.
As someone who reads who appreciates honed writing of the variety that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was won over by the literary tone of the initial part. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates minutiae, like the pail that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, assisted 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 piece candy". She tells Emma's narrative with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."
Frustration and Disruption
I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this new voice could last out the book. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the satisfaction those who appreciate polished prose have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she echoes from her inspiration Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books reasserts itself in the middle section. The protagonist is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while moving between two different states, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as her spouse transitions between poorly supported positions as an addiction therapist in a society fueled by the rage and anxiety that underpins Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she says that she's investigating the murder so that before departing the state, "she could potentially understand something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even perceive".
The Killing Story
So then we come to the homicide in question – and the referenced day spent by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his associates. Kraus utilizes compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what occurred as a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after connecting via an application where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but seems affably to have spent the day with her companions, loitering getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for aggressive outbursts.
Fascination and Incompletion
The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. Yet I wished her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who comes alive in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
