The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with protagonists seeking clean slates, struggling to escape drugs or harmful partnerships, only to see hope turn into conflict. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", rendering it deliberately jaded through recurring use. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" appear throughout the story. At the same time, the author herself seems to be making her own fresh start, as this appears a novel form of writing – observational, truly literary. Yet it reveals itself to be packed with the same dilemmas and styles as earlier books.
From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book
Chris Kraus was originally an artist who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, elevating personal female narrative from abjection into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the following three compelling and abrasive novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a renegade artist who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It is logical that she presently aims to explore different types of content, turning outward to the experiences of others, at a moment when she claims that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing obsolete.
Three Generations, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing several time periods – each trapped by their histories. There is the narrative about Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, transitioning from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. There is the narrative of the author, in the guise of protagonist Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a town long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.
For this reader attracted to honed writing of the kind Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the first section.
As someone who reads who favors honed writing of the style that the author tends to eschew, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the first section. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates trivial aspects, like the pail that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the opening of the book, aided by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language rolling around in their mouths like sweet treats". Kraus writes the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not entirely her own."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this different style could last out the book. The author states here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disruption, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books reasserts itself in the middle section. Catt is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as her spouse transitions between underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a environment propelled by the hostility and dread that drives Trump's victory. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on social media, her professional designation altered from "author" to "property owner" on a reference site. She still gives the impression to care a little too much 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 nation that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even see".
The Homicide Account
So then we come to the actual killing – and the referenced day passed by the deceased with the murderer and his friends. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He sought a sexual encounter but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being shot by Brittney's partner Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.
Obsession and Unfinished Business
Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to delve deeper into her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who becomes vivid partially because of the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. The author informs us that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The complete segment feels oddly unfinished, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
