The Four Spent the Day Together features protagonists chasing after new beginnings, attempting to leave behind addictions or toxic relationships, only to witness hope devolve into violence. The author often employs the phrase "clean slate", rendering it deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" appear throughout the narrative. Meanwhile, she seems to be making her personal new beginning, because this presents as a different type of work – observational, authentically narrative. However it reveals itself to be laden with the same dilemmas and approaches as her previous works.
From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book
Chris Kraus was originally an visual artist who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating intimate women's literature from abjection into defiance. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels did not possess the power and directness that the letter form brought to the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a maverick maker who had evolved into a extensive real estate holder, so there was significant attention on housing investments. It follows that she now wants to explore new kinds of material, directing her gaze to the experiences of others, at a time when she claims that Trumpian politics renders personal narrative unnecessary.
Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering several time periods – none able to break free from their backgrounds. There is the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, representations of Kraus's parents, relocating from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. Additionally the account of Kraus, in the character of Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a town mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.
As a reader fond of honed writing of the kind Kraus typically rejects, I was seduced by the narrative style of the opening part.
Being a reader who favors precise prose of the variety that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. It exhibits a fresh level of observation that allows space for minutiae, like the container that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a great plaything", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like sweet treats". She tells the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was destined to be disappointed when I wished this new voice could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she resents the pleasure audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her inspiration Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels reasserts itself in the second segment. The protagonist is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between two different states, unsuccessful in assisting Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as her spouse moves between poorly supported positions as an substance abuse counselor in a society driven by the rage and anxiety that underpins an electoral success. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her occupation changed from "author" to "real estate holder" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. On one occasion she states that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even see".
The Murder Narrative
Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the titular day spent by the deceased with the killer and his friends. The author possesses great source material, and knows hour by hour what transpired 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 seems amiably to have occupied the day in the company of her associates, wandering about getting his car mended and funding treats and narcotics, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and reckless transgression clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partially because of the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
