🔗 Share this article

The Four Spent the Day Together features protagonists seeking clean slates, attempting to leave behind drugs or harmful partnerships, only to see hope turn into aggression. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", making it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They opted for a clean break" are scattered across the narrative. At the same time, the author herself appears to be undertaking her personal new beginning, since this appears a novel form of writing – observational, genuinely novelistic. But then it reveals itself to be packed with the recurring issues and aesthetics as her previous works.

From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book

The writer was originally an creative who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting confessional female writing from humiliation into defiance. She kept producing books, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the power and directness that the correspondence format imparted to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a maverick maker who had turned into a extensive real estate holder, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It is logical that she now wants to explore different types of content, directing her gaze to other people's stories, at a period in which she asserts that current political era renders personal narrative obsolete.

Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering multiple eras – all unable to escape their pasts. We encounter the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, moving from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. There is the account of Kraus, in the guise of 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 story of the murder of one directionless individual by another in a community long abandoned by progressive politics only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.

From my perspective as a reader attracted to honed writing of the kind Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the first section.

Being a reader who appreciates precise prose of the kind that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the literary tone of the opening segment. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that allows space for minutiae, like the pail that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a great plaything", he answers, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like piece candy". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was fated to feel let down when I wished this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the pleasure audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her idol Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her past books comes back in the second segment. Catt Greene is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a environment driven by the hostility and dread that underpins a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her listed profession modified from "author" to "property owner" on a reference site. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she states that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an the nation 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 referenced day passed by the deceased with the murderer and his companions. Kraus has excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what occurred as Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He sought a sexual encounter but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, mooching around fixing his automobile and funding treats and narcotics, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and reckless transgression clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who gains dimension in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the extent that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par