The Four Spent the Day Together centers on characters chasing after fresh starts, trying to break free from drugs or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into conflict. Chris Kraus frequently uses the phrase "new beginning", making it deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Examples include "He aimed to start over" and "They chose to begin anew" recur in the narrative. At the same time, Kraus herself seems to be making her personal new beginning, since this seems a different type of work – observational, truly literary. However it turns out to be packed with the familiar conflicts and approaches as her previous works.
From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic
Chris Kraus started out as an visual artist who entered the literary world somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, transforming confessional female writing from self-debasement into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the following three engaging and challenging novels lacked the impact and rawness that the epistolary style brought to the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a nonconformist creator who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It follows that she now wants to experiment with new kinds of material, directing her gaze to the experiences of others, at a period in which she asserts that current political era turns intimate literature redundant.
Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, encompassing three generations – all unable to escape their pasts. There is the story of Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, relocating from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a locality mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from the protagonist's home in rural Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader drawn to honed writing of the sort Kraus herself typically rejects, I was seduced by the literary tone of the initial segment.
As someone who reads who favors precise prose of the kind that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the first section. It exhibits a fresh level of observation that accommodates small details, like the container that the young Catt frees from the ice at the start of the story, aided by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a nice toy", he replies, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like hard candy". The author narrates Emma's story with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."
Frustration and Disruption
I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this different style could continue through the novel. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the pleasure those who appreciate polished prose have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to disruption, to the unpolished style she shares with her idol author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her earlier works returns in the central part. Catt Greene is working on refurbishing three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between two different states, unable to aid her husband curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a world propelled by the hostility and dread that underpins an electoral success. A significant portion discusses about the protagonist facing cancellation on a platform, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion 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 social media opponents would fail to comprehend, would not even see".
The Homicide Account
Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day spent by the deceased with the perpetrator and his friends. Kraus has excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, loitering having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.
Fascination and Incompletion
The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I found myself captivated by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who comes alive partly through Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels oddly unfinished, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par
