The Four Spent the Day Together centers on individuals pursuing new beginnings, trying to break free from addictions or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into conflict. Kraus often employs the phrase "fresh start", rendering it intentionally weary through its repetitions. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the text. Meanwhile, she is embarking on her own fresh start, because this seems a different type of work – fact-based, truly literary. Yet it proves to be packed with the recurring issues and approaches as earlier books.
From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book
Chris Kraus began as an visual artist who entered the literary world somewhat by chance with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, elevating personal female narrative from self-debasement into assassination. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels missed the impact and rawness that the epistolary style brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a maverick maker who had evolved into a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It is logical that she currently desires to explore different types of content, turning outward to other people's stories, at a period in which she asserts that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative unnecessary.
Several Eras, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering three generations – none able to break free from their histories. There is the tale of Emma and Jasper, representations of Kraus's parents, transitioning from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. Then there is the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a community mostly forsaken by progressive politics only a short distance from the protagonist's home in rural Minnesota.
As a reader attracted to honed writing of the type Kraus herself typically rejects, I was seduced by the narrative style of the initial segment.
As a reader drawn to precise prose of the variety that the author often disregards, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the initial part. There is a fresh level of observation that accommodates small details, like the pail that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, assisted by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like piece candy". The author narrates the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not entirely her own."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her hero Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books returns in the middle section. Catt Greene is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul manage his alcohol use. She experiences powerlessness as her spouse moves between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a environment propelled by the rage and anxiety that powers a political win. A significant portion discusses about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her listed profession modified from "writer" to "landlord" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she says that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would fail to comprehend, would overlook entirely".
The Killing Story
So then we come to the homicide in question – and the titular day spent by the deceased with the killer and his friends. Kraus utilizes great source material, and details moment by moment what occurred as the victim Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day in the company of her associates, mooching around getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by Brittney's partner Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.
Fascination and Incompletion
The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. Yet I wished her to delve deeper into her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
