The Four Spent the Day Together centers on individuals pursuing fresh starts, struggling to escape addictions or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into aggression. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", transforming it into intentionally weary through recurring use. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the text. At the same time, she seems to be making her personal new beginning, since this seems a new kind of book – observational, genuinely novelistic. However it proves to be packed with the recurring issues and aesthetics as past novels.
From Accidental Writer to Iconic Work
Chris Kraus was originally an visual artist who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as missives to a distant beloved, transforming confessional female writing from humiliation into assassination. She kept producing books, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the impact and rawness that the epistolary style infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a renegade artist who had turned into a major property owner, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It is logical that she currently desires to try out different types of content, directing her gaze to other people's stories, at a moment when she claims that current political era renders personal narrative unnecessary.
Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering three generations – all unable to escape their histories. We encounter the narrative about Emma and Jasper, versions of the author's parents, relocating from the New York borough to a pastoral setting. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the late recognition of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a community long abandoned by liberal ideals only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.
As a reader attracted to polished prose of the kind Kraus herself often avoids, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the first section.
As a reader drawn to precise prose of the kind that the author often disregards, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. There is a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates trivial aspects, like the pail that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a great plaything", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". Kraus writes the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was fated to feel let down when I hoped this different style could continue through the novel. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she has in common with her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works reasserts itself in the second segment. The protagonist is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between two different states, failing to help her husband control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through poorly supported positions as an addiction therapist in a environment propelled by the hostility and dread that drives Trump's victory. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. In a moment she says that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even perceive".
The Homicide Account
Then we reach to the murder itself – and the titular day spent by the deceased with the murderer and his friends. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what happened when Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, loitering getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for aggressive outbursts.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partially because of the protagonist's connection to her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par
