The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with characters chasing after clean slates, trying to break free from substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into conflict. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "new beginning", rendering it intentionally weary through recurring use. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the narrative. At the same time, the author herself is embarking on her individual reinvention, because this seems a new kind of book – fact-based, authentically narrative. However it turns out to be filled with the recurring issues and approaches as earlier books.
From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic
The writer began as an visual artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, transforming personal female narrative from abjection into assassination. She continued writing, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels did not possess the impact and rawness that the letter form infused into the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a renegade artist who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on housing investments. It makes sense that she presently aims to try out new kinds of material, directing her gaze to the experiences of others, at a time when she states that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing redundant.
Several Eras, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning three generations – none able to break free from their pasts. There is the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, transitioning from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. There is the account of Kraus, in the persona of Catt Greene, confronting the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction a man named Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one troubled youth by another in a locality largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.
As a reader fond of polished prose of the type the author herself tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the first section.
As someone who reads drawn to precise prose of the variety that the author tends to eschew, I was seduced by the literary tone of the initial part. It possesses a novel degree of detail that accommodates minutiae, like the pail that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a great plaything", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". She tells Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was fated to feel let down when I hoped this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she dislikes the pleasure audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she echoes from her idol author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her earlier works comes back in the central part. Catt Greene is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while moving between two different states, unable to aid Paul curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as Paul transitions between underfunded jobs as an substance abuse counselor in a society propelled by the anger and fear that powers Trump's victory. A significant portion discusses about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her professional designation altered 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 researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an America that her social media opponents would be unable to grasp, would not even see".
The Homicide Account
Then we reach to the murder itself – and the referenced day spent by the murdered individual with the murderer and his companions. The author possesses great source material, and knows hour by hour what happened when Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day with her companions, mooching around having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partly through Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
