The Four Spent the Day Together features individuals chasing after clean slates, trying to break free from substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into aggression. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", rendering it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" recur in the text. Meanwhile, the author herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, since this appears a different type of work – fact-based, truly literary. But then it reveals itself to be laden with the familiar conflicts and approaches as past novels.
From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic
Chris Kraus began as an creative who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, converting confessional female writing from humiliation into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the impact and rawness that the letter form infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a renegade artist who had turned into a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It follows that she currently desires to experiment with fresh narrative sources, turning outward to external narratives, at a moment when she claims that current political era makes confessional writing redundant.
Three Generations, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, spanning three generations – each trapped by their backgrounds. There is the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, versions of the author's parents, transitioning from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. Finally the narrative of a homicide of one directionless individual by another in a town long abandoned by liberal ideals only a short distance from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.
As a reader fond of honed writing of the sort the author herself typically rejects, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the opening part.
As someone who reads who favors honed writing of the kind that Kraus usually avoids, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. It exhibits 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 beginning of the narrative, helped by her adored dad. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a great plaything", he answers, "the nuanced interpretations of terms tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". The author narrates Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not entirely her own."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was fated to feel let down when I wished this new voice could last out the book. Kraus says here that she dislikes the pleasure audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the unpolished style she shares with her hero author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works comes back in the second segment. The protagonist is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a society propelled by the rage and anxiety that drives a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her occupation changed from "author" to "real estate holder" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she states that she's looking into the killing so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn something about an America that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even see".
The Homicide Account
So then we come to the murder itself – and the referenced day spent by the victim with the killer and his associates. The author possesses great source material, and reconstructs step by step what occurred as Brandon came to meet Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, loitering fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for aggressive outbursts.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and reckless transgression 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 the protagonist's connection to her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman spiraling out of control in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par
