The Four Spent the Day Together features characters seeking fresh starts, attempting to leave behind drugs or toxic relationships, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Phrases such as "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" recur in the story. At the same time, the author herself appears to be undertaking her own fresh start, because this appears a novel form of writing – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. However it reveals itself to be filled with the familiar conflicts and approaches as her previous works.
From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic
Kraus began as an creative who entered the literary world somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating confessional female writing from self-debasement into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the letter form infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her role as a nonconformist creator who had evolved into a extensive real estate holder, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It is logical that she currently desires to explore new kinds of material, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a period in which she asserts that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative unnecessary.
Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering multiple eras – all unable to escape their backgrounds. We encounter the story of Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, relocating from the urban environment to a pastoral setting. There is the account of Kraus, in the persona of Catt Greene, grappling with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a locality long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.
As a reader attracted to polished prose of the type Kraus often avoids, I was seduced by the literary tone of the opening part.
As a reader who appreciates honed writing of the kind that Kraus tends to eschew, I was seduced by the literary tone of the first section. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for minutiae, like the container that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, assisted by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a nice toy", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like piece candy". The author narrates Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she dislikes the satisfaction audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the unpolished style she echoes from her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works reasserts itself in the second segment. Catt is working on refurbishing three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between Minnesota and LA, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a world fueled by the anger and fear that underpins an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her listed profession modified from "author" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. In a moment she remarks that she's investigating the murder so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an America that her Twitter detractors would be unable to grasp, would not even see".
The Homicide Account
So then we come to the homicide in question – and the titular day passed by the victim with the killer and his friends. Kraus has excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when Brandon came to see Brittney after connecting via an application where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day in the company of her associates, mooching around getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being shot by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for aggressive outbursts.
Fascination and Incompletion
The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I found myself captivated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partly through Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman spiraling out of control in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
