The Four Spent the Day Together features characters pursuing clean slates, struggling to escape addictions or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into violence. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", rendering it intentionally weary through its repetitions. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" appear throughout the narrative. Meanwhile, Kraus herself appears to be undertaking her personal new beginning, because this appears a new kind of book – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. But then it reveals itself to be filled with the same dilemmas and approaches as earlier books.
From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book
Kraus started out as an visual artist who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, converting personal female narrative from self-debasement into defiance. She continued writing, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a nonconformist creator who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was significant attention on real estate deals. It makes sense that she presently aims to explore fresh narrative sources, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a moment when she states that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative unnecessary.
Three Generations, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning several time periods – all unable to escape their backgrounds. The book includes the story of characters Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, relocating from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one directionless individual by another in a locality mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.
As a reader fond of honed writing of the kind the author herself typically rejects, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the opening part.
Being a reader drawn to crafted language of the style that the author tends to eschew, I was captivated by the literary tone of the first section. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for trivial aspects, like the bucket that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, assisted by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a nice toy", 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. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."
Frustration and Disruption
I was fated to feel let down when I expected this different style could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she dislikes the pleasure readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the unpolished style she echoes from her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books reasserts itself in the central part. Catt Greene is working on refurbishing multiple decrepit residences in the city's most challenging districts while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a environment propelled by the anger and fear that drives Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her listed profession modified from "author" to "property owner" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. On one occasion she says that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she might be able to learn something about an the nation that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even perceive".
The Homicide Account
Then we reach to the murder itself – and the referenced day spent by the deceased with the murderer and his associates. Kraus has excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He sought a sexual encounter but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, mooching around fixing his automobile and funding treats and narcotics, before being murdered by Brittney's partner Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.
Fascination and Incompletion
The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her own obsessions here. The standout figure is Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the point that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
