The Four Spent the Day Together features characters pursuing new beginnings, struggling to escape substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into aggression. Chris Kraus frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", making it deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" recur in the text. And yet, she is embarking on her personal new beginning, since this presents as a novel form of writing – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. Yet it reveals itself to be filled with the familiar conflicts and styles as her previous works.
From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book
Chris Kraus was originally an artist who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, converting intimate women's literature from abjection into defiance. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the power and directness that the epistolary style imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a renegade artist who had become a major property owner, so there was significant attention on housing investments. It is logical that she presently aims to try out fresh narrative sources, turning outward to the experiences of others, at a period in which she claims that current political era renders personal narrative unnecessary.
Multiple Generations, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering several time periods – all unable to escape their backgrounds. The book includes the narrative about Emma and Jasper, versions of Kraus's parents, relocating from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. Additionally the narrative of the author, in the persona of Catt Greene, confronting the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband her husband Paul. The third thread involves the story of the murder of one directionless individual by another in a locality largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.
For this reader fond of refined literature of the sort Kraus typically rejects, I was seduced by the narrative style of the first section.
As a reader who appreciates precise prose of the style that Kraus often disregards, I was won over by the literary tone of the opening segment. It possesses a fresh level of observation that allows space for small details, like the bucket that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the start of the story, aided by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a great plaything", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like sweet treats". She tells Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not entirely her own."
Frustration and Disruption
I was destined to be disappointed when I hoped this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the pleasure audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her idol author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels returns in the central part. Catt Greene is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid Paul manage his alcohol use. She feels helpless as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a environment fueled by the rage and anxiety that drives a political win. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her listed profession modified from "writer" to "real estate holder" on a reference site. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she says that she's looking into the killing so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an America that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would overlook entirely".
The Murder Narrative
So then we come to the actual killing – and the eponymous day experienced by the deceased with the murderer and his friends. Kraus has excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what transpired when the victim Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day in the company of her associates, wandering about fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I found myself captivated by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to go further into her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who comes alive partially because of Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
