The Four Spent the Day Together centers on individuals chasing after new beginnings, attempting to leave behind addictions or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "new beginning", making it willfully cynical through recurring use. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" are scattered across the text. And yet, she seems to be making her personal new beginning, because this presents as a different type of work – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. However it proves to be packed with the recurring issues and approaches as earlier books.
From Chance Novelist to Iconic Work
Kraus was originally an creative who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting personal female narrative from abjection into assassination. She kept producing books, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels lacked the power and directness that the letter form brought to the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a maverick maker who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It follows that she presently aims to explore new kinds of material, looking outwards to external narratives, at a period in which she asserts that current political era renders personal narrative redundant.
Several Eras, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning three generations – all unable to escape their pasts. The book includes the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, moving from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, confronting the late recognition of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a locality long abandoned by progressive politics only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.
For this reader fond of refined literature of the kind Kraus herself typically rejects, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the opening part.
As someone who reads who appreciates crafted language of the kind that the author often disregards, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that accommodates small details, like the container that the young Catt dislodges from ice at the start of the story, helped by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a great plaything", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". She tells the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."
Frustration and Disruption
I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this fresh tone could persist to the end. The author states here that she resents the enjoyment readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the unpolished style she echoes from her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels reasserts itself in the second segment. Catt is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting Paul curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as Paul transitions between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a society propelled by the rage and anxiety that powers an electoral success. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her occupation changed from "writer" to "landlord" on a reference site. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. At one point she says that she's investigating the murder so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an America that her online critics would not understand, would overlook entirely".
The Killing Story
So then we come to the actual killing – and the titular day passed by the deceased with the perpetrator and his associates. Kraus has compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what happened when Brandon came to see 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, wandering about fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I found myself captivated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The standout figure is Brittney herself, who gains dimension in part due to the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
