The Four Spent the Day Together features protagonists chasing after new beginnings, struggling to escape drugs or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into conflict. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", rendering it willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the story. And yet, she seems to be making her personal new beginning, because this appears a different type of work – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. However it proves to be filled with the familiar conflicts and styles as past novels.
From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book
Chris Kraus began as an visual artist who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, converting confessional female writing from humiliation into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the letter form imparted to the voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a nonconformist creator who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It makes sense that she currently desires to experiment with fresh narrative sources, directing her gaze to the experiences of others, at a moment when she asserts that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature redundant.
Several Eras, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning three generations – each trapped by their pasts. We encounter the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, relocating from the New York borough to the Connecticut countryside. Additionally the account of Kraus, in the character of Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a town long abandoned by liberal ideals only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.
For this reader fond of honed writing of the kind Kraus often avoids, I was seduced by the narrative style of the opening part.
Being a reader who appreciates precise prose of the kind that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the initial part. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that makes room for small details, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the opening of the book, helped by her adored dad. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a great plaything", he replies, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like hard candy". The author narrates Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not entirely her own."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was fated to feel let down when I wished this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the pleasure those who appreciate polished prose have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disruption, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her inspiration Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels reasserts itself in the middle section. Catt is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between Minnesota and LA, unsuccessful in assisting Paul manage his alcohol use. She feels helpless as her spouse cycles through underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a world propelled by the hostility and dread that drives Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "property owner" on a reference site. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. At one point she says that she's investigating the murder so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even perceive".
The Killing Story
So then we come to the actual killing – and the eponymous day experienced by the murdered individual with the killer and his companions. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what happened when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed 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 a man named Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who comes alive partly through Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. The author informs us that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels oddly unfinished, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
