The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with individuals chasing after fresh starts, attempting to leave behind substance abuse or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into conflict. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", making it deliberately jaded through recurring use. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the narrative. Meanwhile, Kraus herself seems to be making her personal new beginning, because this appears a novel form of writing – fact-based, truly literary. Yet it turns out to be packed with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as past novels.
From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book
Chris Kraus started out as an artist who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, converting personal female narrative from humiliation into defiance. She kept producing books, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels lacked the power and directness that the epistolary style imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a renegade artist who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It is logical that she currently desires to experiment with new kinds of material, turning outward to other people's stories, at a period in which she asserts that Trumpian politics renders personal narrative redundant.
Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing three generations – none able to break free from their backgrounds. We encounter the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, versions of Kraus's parents, relocating from the urban environment to a pastoral setting. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a town long abandoned by liberal ideals only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader fond of honed writing of the kind the author herself often avoids, I was seduced by the narrative style of the initial segment.
As a reader who favors crafted language of the style that the author tends to eschew, I was won over by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. There is a novel degree of detail that makes room for trivial aspects, like the bucket that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the opening of the book, assisted by her adored dad. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a lovely toy", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like hard candy". She tells the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this new voice could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she resents the satisfaction audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her hero author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels returns in the second segment. Catt is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between Minnesota and LA, failing to help Paul manage his alcohol use. She experiences powerlessness as Paul transitions between low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a society driven by the anger and fear that drives a political win. A significant portion discusses about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. On one occasion she says that she's investigating the murder so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would overlook entirely".
The Killing Story
Thus we arrive to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day passed by the victim with the perpetrator and his friends. Kraus utilizes excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He sought a sexual encounter but seems affably to have spent the day with her companions, wandering about getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.
Obsession and Unfinished Business
The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid in part due to the protagonist's connection to her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels oddly unfinished, to the point that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
