🔗 Share this article

The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with individuals chasing after fresh starts, attempting to leave behind drugs or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Kraus frequently uses the phrase "new beginning", making it deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the narrative. And yet, she appears to be undertaking her individual reinvention, as this presents as a novel form of writing – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. But then it turns out to be laden with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as earlier books.

From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book

Chris Kraus began as an artist who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, converting confessional female writing from self-debasement into rebellion. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style infused into the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a maverick maker who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It follows that she currently desires to experiment with new kinds of material, directing her gaze to other people's stories, at a moment when she claims that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative obsolete.

Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering multiple eras – all unable to escape their backgrounds. The book includes the tale of Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, relocating from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. There is the narrative of the author, in the character of Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one directionless individual by another in a community long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.

For this reader fond of refined literature of the sort the author herself typically rejects, I was seduced by the narrative style of the first section.

Being a reader drawn to honed writing of the kind that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the first section. There is a fresh level of observation that makes room for minutiae, like the pail that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her cherished parent. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a great plaything", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like piece candy". Kraus writes Emma's story with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this fresh tone could continue through the novel. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the pleasure those who appreciate polished prose have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels reasserts itself in the second segment. Catt Greene is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting Paul manage his alcohol use. She experiences powerlessness as Paul transitions between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a world propelled by the anger and fear that powers a political win. A significant portion discusses about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her occupation changed from "author" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. At one point she remarks that she's investigating the murder so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn something about an the nation that her social media opponents would not understand, would not even perceive".

The Murder Narrative

So then we come to the murder itself – and the titular day passed by the murdered individual with the murderer and his friends. Kraus has excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what occurred as Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day with her companions, mooching around fixing his automobile and funding treats and narcotics, before being shot by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

Catt develops an obsession by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking 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 comes alive partially because of the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels oddly unfinished, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par