The Four Spent the Day Together centers on characters chasing after fresh starts, attempting to leave behind drugs or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into violence. Chris Kraus frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", making it intentionally weary through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the text. At the same time, the author herself is embarking on her own fresh start, because this seems a novel form of writing – fact-based, truly literary. But then it turns out to be filled with the same dilemmas and styles as her previous works.
From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book
The writer was originally an visual artist who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, converting intimate women's literature from humiliation into defiance. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the letter form infused into the voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a renegade artist who had evolved into a major property owner, so there was much discussion on real estate deals. It is logical that she now wants to explore fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a period in which she states that current political era turns intimate literature obsolete.
Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering three generations – each trapped by their pasts. The book includes the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, relocating from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, confronting the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a community largely deserted by progressive politics only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.
As a reader drawn to refined literature of the kind Kraus often avoids, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.
Being a reader who appreciates precise prose of the kind that the author usually avoids, I was won over by the literary tone of the initial part. It exhibits a fresh level of observation that makes room for small details, like the container that the young Catt frees from the ice at the opening of the book, helped by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she exclaims; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". She tells Emma's narrative with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was fated to feel let down when I wished this different style could last out the book. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the pleasure readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to disruption, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her hero Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works comes back in the middle section. Catt is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between two different states, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a environment driven by the rage and anxiety that powers a political win. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her listed profession modified from "writer" to "real estate holder" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she says that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she could potentially understand something about an the nation that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even perceive".
The Murder Narrative
Then we reach to the actual killing – and the eponymous day experienced by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his friends. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and details moment by moment what occurred as the victim Brandon came to visit Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, mooching around getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and daring boundary-pushing clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to go further into her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partly through Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels oddly unfinished, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
