The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with protagonists chasing after fresh starts, attempting to leave behind drugs or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into violence. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", rendering it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the story. And yet, she appears to be undertaking her personal new beginning, as this seems a new kind of book – documentarian, truly literary. Yet it reveals itself to be laden with the recurring issues and aesthetics as past novels.
From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic
The writer was originally an visual artist who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating intimate women's literature from abjection into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels missed the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style imparted to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her role as a renegade artist who had turned into a major property owner, so there was much discussion on real estate deals. It makes sense that she presently aims to try out fresh narrative sources, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a period in which she asserts that Trumpian politics makes confessional writing redundant.
Three Generations, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering three generations – each trapped by their histories. There is the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, relocating from the New York borough to a pastoral setting. There is the narrative of the author, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband Paul. Finally the story of the murder of one troubled youth by another in a town long abandoned by progressive politics only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.
From my perspective as a reader attracted to refined literature of the sort Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the narrative style of the opening part.
As someone who reads drawn to precise prose of the variety that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates minutiae, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her adored dad. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she exclaims; "a great plaything", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms rolling around in their mouths like hard candy". She tells the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not entirely her own."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was fated to feel let down when I wished this new voice could continue through the novel. The author states here that she is annoyed by the satisfaction audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works returns in the central part. Catt is working on refurbishing multiple decrepit residences in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while moving between Minnesota and LA, unable to aid her husband control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a world propelled by the anger and fear that powers an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her listed profession modified from "writer" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she says that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her online critics would not understand, would not even see".
The Murder Narrative
Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the eponymous day passed by the deceased with the murderer and his associates. The author possesses excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what happened when Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but seems affably to have spent the day with her companions, wandering about getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has repeatedly received inpatient care for aggressive outbursts.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman spiraling out of control in a struggling, neglected community. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
