The Four Spent the Day Together centers on protagonists chasing after new beginnings, struggling to escape substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into violence. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", making it intentionally weary through recurring use. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the text. At the same time, she appears to be undertaking her own fresh start, since this appears a new kind of book – documentarian, authentically narrative. However it proves to be filled with the recurring issues and approaches as past novels.
From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic
The writer started out as an artist who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming confessional female writing from abjection into rebellion. She kept producing books, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels missed the power and directness that the correspondence format brought to the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a renegade artist who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It makes sense that she currently desires to explore fresh narrative sources, turning outward to external narratives, at a time when she claims that contemporary political climate turns intimate literature unnecessary.
Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, encompassing multiple eras – each trapped by their histories. There is the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, relocating from the Bronx to a pastoral setting. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a town largely deserted by progressive politics only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.
From my perspective as a reader attracted to polished prose of the sort Kraus herself typically rejects, I was seduced by the narrative style of the opening part.
As someone who reads who favors precise prose of the variety that Kraus herself often disregards, I was captivated by the literary tone of the initial part. There is a novel degree of detail that allows space for minutiae, like the pail that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, aided by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words rolling around in their mouths like hard candy". She tells the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not entirely her own."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was fated to feel let down when I expected this different style could last out the book. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her past books reasserts itself in the middle section. The protagonist is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting Paul manage his alcohol use. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a world fueled by the rage and anxiety that powers Trump's victory. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her occupation changed from "author" to "landlord" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. At one point she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn 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 homicide in question – and the referenced day experienced by the victim with the perpetrator and his friends. Kraus has excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what transpired when a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she offered adult photos. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, mooching around fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for aggressive outbursts.
Obsession and Unfinished Business
The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I found myself captivated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The standout figure is Brittney, who gains dimension partially because of the protagonist's connection to her – another bright, bullied girl spiraling out of control in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels oddly unfinished, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par
