The Four Spent the Day Together features protagonists seeking clean slates, attempting to leave behind drugs or harmful partnerships, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. The author often employs the phrase "clean slate", rendering it willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the text. At the same time, the author herself seems to be making her own fresh start, since this seems a new kind of book – documentarian, authentically narrative. Yet it turns out to be filled with the familiar conflicts and styles as earlier books.
From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic
Chris Kraus was originally an artist who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, converting confessional female writing from abjection into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the letter form brought to the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her position as a renegade artist who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It makes sense that she now wants to experiment with fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to external narratives, at a moment when she states that current political era turns intimate literature unnecessary.
Multiple Generations, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, encompassing several time periods – all unable to escape their backgrounds. The book includes the tale of Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, moving from the New York borough to the Connecticut countryside. There is the account of Kraus, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one directionless individual by another in a town largely deserted by liberal ideals only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.
For this reader fond of honed writing of the sort Kraus often avoids, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the first section.
As a reader who favors honed writing of the kind that Kraus tends to eschew, I was captivated by the literary tone of the first section. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that allows space for minutiae, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child dislodges from ice at the start of the story, assisted by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a lovely toy", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". Kraus writes the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was fated to feel let down when I hoped this different style could continue through the novel. The author states here that she dislikes the pleasure readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her hero Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her past books comes back in the middle section. Catt is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while shuttling between two different states, failing to help Paul control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a environment driven by the hostility and dread that underpins an electoral success. A significant portion discusses about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "author" to "landlord" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment 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 see".
The Homicide Account
Then we reach to the murder itself – and the titular day experienced by the victim with the murderer and his companions. Kraus has excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what occurred as the victim Brandon came to visit 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 with her companions, loitering fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I found myself captivated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who gains dimension in part due to the protagonist's connection to her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
