The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with protagonists pursuing new beginnings, struggling to escape drugs or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into conflict. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", making it deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the text. Meanwhile, she seems to be making her personal new beginning, since this presents as a different type of work – observational, truly literary. But then it reveals itself to be laden with the same dilemmas and approaches as earlier books.
From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book
The writer started out as an artist who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating personal female narrative from humiliation into defiance. She kept producing books, but the following three compelling and abrasive novels lacked the impact and rawness that the letter form infused into the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her role as a maverick maker who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It is logical that she currently desires to try out new kinds of material, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a period in which she asserts that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature unnecessary.
Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering three generations – each trapped by their pasts. We encounter the narrative about Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, transitioning from the Bronx to a pastoral setting. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. Finally the narrative of a homicide of one directionless individual by another in a town largely deserted by progressive politics only 80 miles from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader attracted to polished prose of the sort the author herself often avoids, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the opening part.
As someone who reads who favors precise prose of the variety that the author tends to eschew, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates minutiae, like the bucket that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a great plaything", he replies, "the nuanced interpretations of terms rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". She tells the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was fated to feel let down when I hoped this different style could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the pleasure audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the unpolished style she echoes from her idol author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works returns in the central part. The protagonist is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul manage his alcohol use. She feels helpless as her spouse transitions between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a world fueled by the hostility and dread that drives Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her listed profession modified from "writer" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. On one occasion she says that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".
The Homicide Account
So then we come to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day experienced by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his companions. Kraus utilizes compelling foundational content, and details moment by moment what transpired when Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He sought a sexual encounter but seems amiably to have occupied the day with her companions, wandering about getting his car mended and funding treats and narcotics, before being shot by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt develops an obsession by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her own obsessions here. The standout figure is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partially because of Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl spiraling out of control in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
