The Four Spent the Day Together features characters chasing after clean slates, attempting to leave behind drugs or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "new beginning", transforming it into willfully cynical through recurring use. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the text. Meanwhile, Kraus herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, because this seems a different type of work – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. However it reveals itself to be filled with the same dilemmas and styles as past novels.
From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book
Kraus started out as an visual artist who entered the literary world somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting personal female narrative from abjection into rebellion. She kept producing books, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels missed the shock and immediacy that the letter form brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her role as a renegade artist who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on housing investments. It follows that she presently aims to experiment with fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a period in which she asserts that contemporary political climate turns intimate literature redundant.
Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering several time periods – each trapped by their histories. We encounter the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, relocating from the New York borough to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a town mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader drawn to polished prose of the type the author herself often avoids, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the first section.
As someone who reads drawn to precise prose of the variety that the author tends to eschew, I was captivated by the storytelling approach of the first section. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that allows space for minutiae, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the opening of the book, helped by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the nuanced interpretations of terms tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". The author narrates the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was fated to feel let down when I wished this new voice could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the pleasure audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her hero author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her earlier works reasserts itself in the second segment. The protagonist is attempting to do up multiple decrepit residences in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid Paul control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through poorly supported positions as an recovery specialist in a environment fueled by the hostility and dread that underpins an electoral success. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "real estate holder" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to be overly concerned about this. At one point she remarks that she's investigating the murder so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would overlook entirely".
The Homicide Account
So then we come to the homicide in question – and the titular day experienced by the deceased with the perpetrator and his companions. Kraus utilizes excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what happened when Brandon came to see Brittney after connecting via an application where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day in the company of her associates, loitering fixing his automobile and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
Catt develops an obsession by the account, and I found myself captivated 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 go further into her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who gains dimension partly through the protagonist's connection to her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
