The Four Spent the Day Together centers on protagonists seeking new beginnings, attempting to leave behind drugs or harmful partnerships, only to witness hope devolve into violence. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "fresh start", making it deliberately jaded through recurring use. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the narrative. And yet, Kraus herself seems to be making her personal new beginning, because this presents as a different type of work – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. But then it turns out to be packed with the familiar conflicts and approaches as her previous works.
From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic
The writer was originally an artist who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, converting personal female narrative from humiliation into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels lacked the power and directness that the letter form brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her role as a maverick maker who had become a major property owner, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It makes sense that she now wants to experiment with different types of content, looking outwards to external narratives, at a time when she asserts that current political era renders personal narrative redundant.
Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering several time periods – each trapped by their backgrounds. There is the tale of characters Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, relocating from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the late recognition of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a locality long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.
As a reader fond of polished prose of the sort the author herself often avoids, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.
As someone who reads drawn to precise prose of the style that Kraus tends to eschew, I was seduced by the literary tone of the initial part. There is a fresh level of observation that allows space for small details, like the bucket that the young Catt frees from the ice at the start of the story, helped by her cherished parent. "I found an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a great plaything", he answers, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like sweet treats". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."
Frustration and Disruption
I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this different style could last out the book. The author states here that she dislikes the enjoyment readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works comes back in the middle section. The protagonist is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between two different states, unable to aid Paul control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between underfunded jobs as an substance abuse counselor in a environment driven by the hostility and dread that drives an electoral success. A significant portion discusses about Catt being cancelled on social media, her listed profession modified from "author" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. In a moment she states that she's looking into the killing so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an America that her Twitter detractors would fail to comprehend, would not even perceive".
The Killing Story
So then we come to the murder itself – and the titular day experienced by the victim with the perpetrator and his companions. Kraus has 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 offered adult photos. He sought a sexual encounter but seems amiably to have occupied the day with her companions, loitering getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend a man named 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 narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to delve deeper into her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who comes alive partly through Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
