The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with individuals seeking new beginnings, attempting to leave behind addictions or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into violence. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", rendering it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" recur in the text. At the same time, Kraus herself is embarking on her personal new beginning, because this appears a novel form of writing – observational, truly literary. However it turns out to be laden with the recurring issues and aesthetics as her previous works.
From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic
Chris Kraus began as an creative who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating personal female narrative from abjection into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the following three fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the power and directness that the letter form infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a nonconformist creator who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It is logical that she now wants to explore new kinds of material, directing her gaze to the experiences of others, at a period in which she asserts that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing obsolete.
Three Generations, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning multiple eras – all unable to escape their backgrounds. There is the narrative about Emma and Jasper, representations of Kraus's parents, relocating from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the guise of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a community mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.
As a reader attracted to polished prose of the type the author herself typically rejects, I was seduced by the literary tone of the opening part.
Being a reader who favors crafted language of the variety that the author often disregards, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for trivial aspects, like the bucket that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". She tells Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."
Frustration and Disruption
I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this new voice could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she resents the enjoyment readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disruption, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her hero Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels returns in the central part. Catt is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help her husband control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a environment propelled by the anger and fear that drives an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "real estate holder" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she states that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an America that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would overlook entirely".
The Murder Narrative
Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the referenced day experienced by the victim with the murderer and his friends. Kraus has compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what occurred as a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, wandering about getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for aggressive outbursts.
Fascination and Incompletion
The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to delve deeper into her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par
