The Four Spent the Day Together features individuals seeking fresh starts, struggling to escape addictions or harmful partnerships, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", transforming it into willfully cynical through its repetitions. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" appear throughout the narrative. At the same time, Kraus herself appears to be undertaking her individual reinvention, as this presents as a different type of work – observational, authentically narrative. Yet it reveals itself to be packed with the recurring issues and approaches as her previous works.
From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book
Chris Kraus began as an creative who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating intimate women's literature from humiliation into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels missed the power and directness that the epistolary style imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a maverick maker who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It is logical that she currently desires to try out fresh narrative sources, turning outward to external narratives, at a time when she asserts that current political era renders personal narrative obsolete.
Three Generations, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering multiple eras – each trapped by their backgrounds. The book includes the story of characters Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, relocating from the New York borough to a pastoral setting. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a locality mostly forsaken by progressive politics only a short distance from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.
From my perspective as a reader fond of honed writing of the type Kraus herself typically rejects, I was seduced by the narrative style of the initial segment.
Being a reader drawn to precise prose of the variety that the author often disregards, I was seduced by the literary tone of the opening segment. It exhibits a fresh level of observation that makes room for minutiae, like the pail that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the opening of the book, helped by her cherished parent. "I found an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". The author narrates Emma's narrative with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this fresh tone could last out the book. The author states here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment those who appreciate polished prose have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books comes back in the second segment. Catt Greene is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a environment driven by the anger and fear that powers an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her occupation changed from "author" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. At one point she states that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even see".
The Murder Narrative
Thus we arrive to the homicide in question – and the titular day passed by the deceased with the perpetrator and his friends. The author possesses great source material, and knows hour by hour what happened when Brandon came to visit Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, loitering getting his car mended and funding treats and narcotics, before being shot by Brittney's partner Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.
Fascination and Incompletion
The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I found myself captivated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards responsible documentation and reckless transgression tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to go further into her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who comes alive partly through Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
