The Four Spent the Day Together features characters seeking new beginnings, attempting to leave behind addictions or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into conflict. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", rendering it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the text. Meanwhile, Kraus herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, because this presents as a different type of work – observational, truly literary. But then it reveals itself to be filled with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as past novels.
From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work
Kraus began as an visual artist who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, converting intimate women's literature from self-debasement into assassination. She continued writing, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a maverick maker who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on housing investments. It follows that she currently desires to try out new kinds of material, turning outward to the experiences of others, at a period in which she asserts that current political era turns intimate literature redundant.
Several Eras, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, spanning multiple eras – none able to break free from their backgrounds. There is the story of Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, transitioning from the New York borough to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a locality mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.
As a reader drawn to polished prose of the sort Kraus often avoids, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.
Being a reader who favors precise prose of the style that the author usually avoids, I was captivated by the literary tone of the first section. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that makes room for trivial aspects, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the opening of the book, aided by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a great plaything", he answers, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like hard candy". The author narrates the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not entirely her own."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the pleasure audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disruption, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels returns in the middle section. Catt is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while shuttling between two different states, unable to aid her husband control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul moves between poorly supported positions as an addiction therapist in a society driven by the rage and anxiety that powers an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. On one occasion she states that she's investigating the murder so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her social media opponents would be unable to grasp, would overlook entirely".
The Killing Story
Then we reach to the actual killing – and the titular day passed by the deceased with the killer and his associates. Kraus utilizes excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what occurred as Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He sought a sexual encounter but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, wandering about 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.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt develops an obsession by the story, and I was intrigued 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 explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the point that her narrative ends almost mid-par
