The Four Spent the Day Together centers on individuals chasing after clean slates, struggling to escape drugs or harmful partnerships, only to witness hope devolve into violence. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "new beginning", transforming it into willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the text. And yet, the author herself is embarking on her individual reinvention, because this presents as a novel form of writing – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. But then it turns out to be laden with the familiar conflicts and approaches as earlier books.
From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic
Kraus began as an creative who transitioned to writing unintentionally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, converting intimate women's literature from abjection into defiance. She continued writing, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels missed the impact and rawness that the epistolary style imparted to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a nonconformist creator who had turned into a extensive real estate holder, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It makes sense that she now wants to explore different types of content, turning outward to the experiences of others, at a period in which she asserts that current political era renders personal narrative obsolete.
Three Generations, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering several time periods – none able to break free from their pasts. We encounter the tale of characters Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, moving from the New York borough to the Connecticut countryside. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband a man named Paul. The third thread involves 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 a remote part of Minnesota.
For this reader drawn to polished prose of the sort Kraus herself typically rejects, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the initial segment.
As someone who reads drawn to honed writing of the style that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was captivated by the literary tone of the initial part. There is a fresh level of observation that accommodates small details, like the pail that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the opening of the book, helped by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". Kraus writes 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 destined to be disappointed when I expected this fresh tone could continue through the novel. Kraus says here that she resents the satisfaction those who appreciate polished prose have gotten from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she echoes from her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels reasserts itself in the second segment. Catt Greene is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting Paul manage his alcohol use. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a environment fueled by the hostility and dread that powers a political win. A significant portion discusses about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "landlord" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she says that she's looking into the killing so that before leaving Minnesota, "she could potentially understand something about an the nation that her social media opponents would not understand, would not even see".
The Killing Story
Then we reach to the actual killing – and the titular day experienced by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his friends. Kraus utilizes great source material, and knows hour by hour what happened when Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, mooching around having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for aggressive outbursts.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I found myself captivated by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who comes alive partly through Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a struggling, neglected community. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
