The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with protagonists chasing after clean slates, trying to break free from drugs or toxic relationships, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. The author often employs the phrase "fresh start", making it willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Phrases such as "He aimed to start over" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the story. Meanwhile, Kraus herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, because this presents as a novel form of writing – observational, authentically narrative. But then it proves to be filled with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as her previous works.
From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work
Chris Kraus started out as an artist who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, transforming personal female narrative from abjection into rebellion. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her position as a maverick maker who had evolved into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It is logical that she currently desires to explore new kinds of material, turning outward to other people's stories, at a period in which she states that Trumpian politics renders personal narrative redundant.
Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning multiple eras – each trapped by their pasts. There is the tale of characters Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, moving from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a locality long abandoned by liberal ideals only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.
From my perspective as a reader attracted to honed writing of the type Kraus herself often avoids, I was captivated by the narrative style of the initial segment.
As someone who reads who appreciates precise prose of the variety that Kraus often disregards, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the first section. It possesses a novel degree of detail that makes room for minutiae, like the pail that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, helped by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a lovely toy", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like hard candy". The author narrates the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this fresh tone could continue through the novel. Kraus says here that she resents the satisfaction those who appreciate polished prose have derived from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her idol writer 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 traveling between two different states, unsuccessful in assisting her husband curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul moves between poorly supported positions as an addiction therapist in a environment propelled by the hostility and dread that drives Trump's victory. A significant portion discusses about Catt being cancelled on social media, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. At one point she says that she's looking into the killing so that before leaving Minnesota, "she might be able to learn something about an the United States that her social media opponents would fail to comprehend, would not even see".
The Homicide Account
So then we come to the actual killing – and the referenced day spent by the deceased with the perpetrator and his associates. Kraus has excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what occurred as the victim Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, loitering having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being murdered by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.
Obsession and Unfinished Business
The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who becomes vivid partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par
