The Four Spent the Day Together centers on characters chasing after fresh starts, struggling to escape addictions or toxic relationships, only to see hope turn into aggression. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", making it willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the story. And yet, she is embarking on her individual reinvention, because this appears a novel form of writing – documentarian, authentically narrative. But then it reveals itself to be laden with the recurring issues and styles as her previous works.
From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic
The writer was originally an visual artist who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating confessional female writing from self-debasement into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels lacked the impact and rawness that the correspondence format imparted to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a nonconformist creator who had turned into a major property owner, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It makes sense that she now wants to explore fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to external narratives, at a period in which she asserts that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative redundant.
Several Eras, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, spanning multiple eras – each trapped by their histories. The book includes the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, relocating from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a locality largely deserted by liberal ideals only a short distance from the protagonist's home in rural Minnesota.
For this reader drawn to polished prose of the kind Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the first section.
As someone who reads who appreciates crafted language of the variety that Kraus herself often disregards, I was seduced by the literary tone of the initial part. There is a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for small details, like the pail that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the start of the story, assisted by her cherished parent. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like hard candy". The author narrates the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was fated to feel let down when I hoped this new voice could continue through the novel. The author states here that she is annoyed by the pleasure audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the unpolished style she has in common with her hero Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her past books comes back in the middle section. Catt is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between two different states, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as her spouse moves between underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a society fueled by the anger and fear that drives an electoral success. A significant portion discusses about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her occupation changed from "novelist" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. At one point she remarks that she's investigating the murder so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her social media opponents would be unable to grasp, would not even see".
The Homicide Account
So then we come to the actual killing – and the eponymous day spent by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his associates. The author possesses excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what occurred as a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, wandering about getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.
Obsession and Unfinished Business
The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The standout figure is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partly through the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par
