The Four Spent the Day Together features protagonists pursuing fresh starts, attempting to leave behind addictions or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into violence. Kraus frequently uses the phrase "new beginning", making it deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They opted for a clean break" are scattered across the text. And yet, the author herself is embarking on her own fresh start, as this presents as a different type of work – documentarian, authentically narrative. Yet it reveals itself to be laden with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as her previous works.
From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book
Chris Kraus started out as an visual artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, transforming confessional female writing from humiliation into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the impact and rawness that the correspondence format infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a renegade artist who had evolved into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It is logical that she currently desires to try out different types of content, looking outwards to external narratives, at a time when she asserts that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative unnecessary.
Three Generations, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning three generations – none able to break free from their backgrounds. There is the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, versions of the author's parents, relocating from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. Then there is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a town long abandoned by liberal ideals only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.
As a reader attracted to honed writing of the sort Kraus often avoids, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the first section.
As a reader who favors honed writing of the style that the author usually avoids, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the first section. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for trivial aspects, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the start of the story, aided by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a great plaything", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language rolling around in their mouths like hard candy". The author narrates Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was fated to feel let down when I wished this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she resents the pleasure audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the unpolished style she echoes from her idol author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her past books returns in the second segment. The protagonist is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while moving between Minnesota and LA, failing to help Paul control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a world propelled by the anger and fear that underpins Trump's victory. A significant portion discusses about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. In a moment she states that she's looking into the killing so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".
The Murder Narrative
So then we come to the murder itself – and the eponymous day experienced by the victim with the killer and his companions. The author possesses excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what happened when Brandon came to visit Brittney after connecting via an application where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, loitering fixing his automobile and funding treats and narcotics, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing clash in this segment. Yet I wished her to delve deeper into her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partially because of Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman derailing in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
