The Four Spent the Day Together features protagonists pursuing fresh starts, attempting to leave behind addictions or toxic relationships, only to witness hope devolve into violence. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", rendering it intentionally weary through recurring use. Examples include "He aimed to start over" and "They chose to begin anew" appear throughout the story. And yet, Kraus herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, as this seems a new kind of book – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. However it proves to be filled with the same dilemmas and styles as past novels.
From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book
The writer started out as an artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting personal female narrative from humiliation into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format infused into the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a renegade artist who had evolved into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It follows that she currently desires to explore different types of content, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a period in which she states that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative obsolete.
Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning three generations – all unable to escape their backgrounds. We encounter the story of characters Emma and Jasper, versions of the author's parents, transitioning from the New York borough to a pastoral setting. Additionally the narrative of the author, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, confronting the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband a man named Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one directionless individual by another in a town long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from the protagonist's home in rural Minnesota.
For this reader drawn to honed writing of the type Kraus herself typically rejects, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the initial segment.
As someone who reads who appreciates precise prose of the variety that the author often disregards, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the first section. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for small details, like the pail that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he answers, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like hard candy". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was destined to be disappointed when I wished this new voice could last out the book. The author states here that she is annoyed by the pleasure audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her hero author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels comes back in the central part. Catt Greene is working on refurbishing three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as her spouse moves between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a society propelled by the rage and anxiety that powers Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her occupation changed from "novelist" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she says that she's investigating the murder so that before departing the state, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her online critics would not understand, would overlook entirely".
The Homicide Account
Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the referenced day experienced by the murdered individual with the killer and his companions. Kraus has great source material, and knows hour by hour what happened when a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, loitering fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by Brittney's partner 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 story, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who comes alive partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman spiraling out of control in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
