🔗 Share this article

The Four Spent the Day Together features protagonists chasing after clean slates, attempting to leave behind addictions or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", making it intentionally weary through recurring use. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" recur in the story. At the same time, she appears to be undertaking her individual reinvention, as this presents as a new kind of book – fact-based, authentically narrative. But then it reveals itself to be laden with the same dilemmas and styles as past novels.

From Chance Novelist to Iconic Work

The writer began as an visual artist who entered the literary world somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating confessional female writing from humiliation into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the following three compelling and abrasive novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a maverick maker who had evolved into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It makes sense that she presently aims to explore new kinds of material, directing her gaze to the experiences of others, at a time when she asserts that current political era makes confessional writing redundant.

Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering several time periods – each trapped by their histories. There is the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, relocating from the urban environment to a pastoral setting. There is the account of Kraus, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. Finally the story of the murder of one directionless individual by another in a locality long abandoned by liberal ideals only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in rural Minnesota.

As a reader fond of polished prose of the sort the author herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.

As someone who reads who favors honed writing of the style that Kraus tends to eschew, I was captivated by the storytelling approach of the initial part. There is a fresh level of observation that makes room for minutiae, like the bucket that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the opening of the book, helped by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". She tells Emma's story with interest and closeness. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not entirely her own."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this different style could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she resents the satisfaction readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to disruption, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books returns in the middle section. Catt is attempting to do up multiple decrepit residences in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a society driven by the rage and anxiety that drives an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she says that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she could potentially understand something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would fail to comprehend, would not even see".

The Killing Story

So then we come to the actual killing – and the referenced day passed by the victim with the murderer and his friends. Kraus has excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what transpired when Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He sought a sexual encounter but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, loitering having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I found myself captivated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to go further into her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl spiraling out of control in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par