🔗 Share this article

The Four Spent the Day Together centers on characters chasing after fresh starts, attempting to leave behind substance abuse or harmful partnerships, only to witness hope devolve into conflict. Kraus often employs the phrase "new beginning", making it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the narrative. At the same time, she is embarking on her personal new beginning, since this presents as a different type of work – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. However it reveals itself to be packed with the recurring issues and styles as earlier books.

From Chance Novelist to Iconic Work

Chris Kraus started out as an creative who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, structured as missives to a distant beloved, elevating confessional female writing from abjection into assassination. She continued writing, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels missed the power and directness that the correspondence format imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a nonconformist creator who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on real estate deals. It is logical that she currently desires to explore new kinds of material, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a period in which she claims that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature redundant.

Several Eras, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing three generations – each trapped by their pasts. We encounter the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, representations of Kraus's parents, transitioning from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the persona of Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her partner struggling with addiction a man named Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a town long abandoned by liberal ideals only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.

As a reader drawn to honed writing of the sort Kraus typically rejects, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the first section.

As someone who reads drawn to crafted language of the variety that Kraus herself often disregards, I was captivated by the literary tone of the opening segment. There is a fresh level of observation that makes room for minutiae, like the pail that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the opening of the book, helped by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a great plaything", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". She tells Emma's narrative with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."

Frustration and Disruption

I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this fresh tone could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the pleasure readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disruption, to the unpolished style she shares with her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books comes back in the second segment. The protagonist is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as her spouse cycles through poorly supported positions as an addiction therapist in a world driven by the anger and fear that powers Trump's victory. A significant portion discusses about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her occupation changed from "author" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she remarks that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an America that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even perceive".

The Murder Narrative

So then we come to the homicide in question – and the referenced day passed by the victim with the killer and his associates. The author possesses excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when the victim Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, loitering fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who comes alive partly through Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par