The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with individuals pursuing fresh starts, struggling to escape substance abuse or toxic relationships, only to witness hope devolve into violence. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", transforming it into intentionally weary through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the narrative. Meanwhile, Kraus herself is embarking on her own fresh start, because this seems a new kind of book – fact-based, truly literary. But then it turns out to be filled with the same dilemmas and styles as past novels.
From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic
Kraus started out as an visual artist who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, elevating intimate women's literature from abjection into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the letter form infused into the voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her position as a renegade artist who had become a major property owner, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It is logical that she presently aims to explore fresh narrative sources, turning outward to external narratives, at a period in which 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, spanning multiple eras – none able to break free from their histories. We encounter the narrative about Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, transitioning from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. Additionally the narrative of the author, in the guise of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a community largely deserted by progressive politics only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader attracted to honed writing of the sort Kraus often avoids, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the first section.
As a reader who favors precise prose of the variety that the author usually avoids, I was won over by the literary tone of the initial part. There is a fresh level of observation 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 beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he answers, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". The author narrates Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."
Frustration and Disruption
I was fated to feel let down when I hoped this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the pleasure readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the unpolished style she echoes from her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her earlier works returns in the second segment. Catt Greene is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid Paul control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a society fueled by the hostility and dread that underpins Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "author" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she states that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she might be able to learn something about an America that her social media opponents would not understand, would not even perceive".
The Murder Narrative
Thus we arrive to the homicide in question – and the titular day passed by the victim with the killer and his associates. Kraus utilizes excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what happened when Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she offered adult photos. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day in the company of her associates, loitering getting his car mended and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.
Fascination and Incompletion
The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who comes alive partly through Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par
