The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with characters chasing after new beginnings, struggling to escape drugs or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Chris Kraus frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", making it willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" appear throughout the narrative. And yet, the author herself appears to be undertaking her own fresh start, as this presents as a novel form of writing – documentarian, truly literary. However it reveals itself to be packed with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as past novels.
From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic
The writer was originally an creative who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, structured as epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating confessional female writing from abjection into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels lacked the impact and rawness that the letter form infused into the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a maverick maker who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It makes sense that she currently desires to explore fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to external narratives, at a moment when she states that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature obsolete.
Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning several time periods – all unable to escape their histories. There is the tale of Emma and Jasper, versions of the author's parents, transitioning from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. There is the account of Kraus, in the character of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband a man named Paul. Finally the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a community long abandoned by progressive politics only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.
For this reader attracted to polished prose of the sort Kraus tends to eschew, I was captivated by the narrative style of the opening part.
Being a reader who appreciates honed writing of the style that Kraus usually avoids, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for minutiae, like the bucket that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a nice toy", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was fated to feel let down when I wished this different style could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she resents the pleasure readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to disruption, to the unpolished style she shares with her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels reasserts itself in the second segment. Catt Greene is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between two different states, unsuccessful in assisting her husband control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul transitions between poorly supported positions as an recovery specialist in a environment driven by the hostility and dread that powers Trump's victory. A significant portion discusses about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her listed profession modified from "author" to "landlord" on the online encyclopedia. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. At one point she remarks that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would not even see".
The Murder Narrative
So then we come to the actual killing – and the referenced day passed by the murdered individual with the killer 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 meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, wandering about getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has repeatedly received inpatient care for aggressive outbursts.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
Catt develops an obsession by the story, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, 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 speaks to Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the point that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
