The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with individuals seeking fresh starts, attempting to leave behind substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", making it deliberately jaded through recurring use. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" recur in the text. And yet, the author herself seems to be making her own fresh start, since this seems a different type of work – observational, genuinely novelistic. But then it proves to be packed with the recurring issues and aesthetics as her previous works.
From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic
Kraus began as an creative who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as missives to a distant beloved, transforming confessional female writing from abjection into assassination. She kept producing books, but the following three compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the impact and rawness that the correspondence format infused into the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a nonconformist creator who had evolved into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on real estate deals. It makes sense that she currently desires to explore different types of content, turning outward to the experiences of others, at a period in which she asserts that current political era makes confessional writing unnecessary.
Several Eras, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, encompassing several time periods – each trapped by their pasts. There is the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, transitioning from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of protagonist Catt Greene, confronting the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. Finally the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a town long abandoned by progressive politics only a short distance from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader fond of polished prose of the sort the author herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the literary tone of the first section.
Being a reader who appreciates precise prose of the style that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was seduced by the literary tone of the opening segment. There is a novel degree of detail that makes room for trivial aspects, like the container that the young Catt dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she exclaims; "a lovely toy", he answers, "the nuanced interpretations of terms rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". She tells the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."
Frustration and Disruption
I was fated to feel let down when I hoped this different style could continue through the novel. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the pleasure readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her inspiration Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels returns in the central part. Catt Greene is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a society driven by the anger and fear that underpins an electoral success. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on social media, her occupation changed from "novelist" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she states that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an America that her social media opponents would fail to comprehend, would overlook entirely".
The Killing Story
Thus we arrive to the homicide in question – and the referenced day experienced by the deceased with the murderer and his friends. Kraus utilizes great source material, and details moment by moment what happened when a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after connecting via an application where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, loitering fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by Brittney's partner Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for aggressive outbursts.
Fascination and Incompletion
The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and reckless transgression tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to go further into her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who becomes vivid partially because of Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman spiraling out of control in a struggling, neglected community. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she fails to enact these dialogues. This entire part feels oddly unfinished, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par