The Four Spent the Day Together features protagonists pursuing new beginnings, trying to break free from drugs or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into conflict. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", making it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" are scattered across the narrative. And yet, Kraus herself is embarking on her individual reinvention, since this presents as a new kind of book – observational, authentically narrative. However it turns out to be filled with the familiar conflicts and styles as earlier books.
From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book
Kraus started out as an artist who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, transforming personal female narrative from self-debasement into defiance. She continued writing, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style infused into the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a nonconformist creator who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It makes sense that she currently desires to explore new kinds of material, directing her gaze to the experiences of others, at a period in which she states that current political era turns intimate literature unnecessary.
Several Eras, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning multiple eras – none able to break free from their backgrounds. There is the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, moving from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. Finally the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a locality largely deserted by progressive politics only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in rural Minnesota.
As a reader drawn to honed writing of the type the author herself often avoids, I was seduced by the narrative style of the opening part.
Being a reader drawn to honed writing of the kind that the author tends to eschew, I was captivated by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that allows space for trivial aspects, like the pail that the protagonist as a child dislodges from ice at the start of the story, helped by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a great plaything", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like hard candy". She tells the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was bound to become frustrated when I wished 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 fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her hero author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her earlier works returns in the second segment. The protagonist is working on refurbishing multiple decrepit residences in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between Minnesota and LA, unsuccessful in assisting Paul control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through poorly supported positions as an substance abuse counselor in a environment propelled by the anger and fear that powers Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. At one point she states that she's looking into the killing so that before exiting the region, "she could potentially understand something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even perceive".
The Murder Narrative
Then we reach to the actual killing – and the eponymous day spent by the victim with the perpetrator and his friends. The author possesses excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what happened when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day with her companions, mooching around getting his car mended and funding treats and narcotics, before being murdered by her romantic interest Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.
Fascination and Incompletion
The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
