The Four Spent the Day Together features protagonists seeking clean slates, struggling to escape drugs or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into conflict. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", rendering it willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Examples include "He aimed to start over" and "They chose to begin anew" recur in the text. At the same time, she seems to be making her personal new beginning, as this presents as a new kind of book – fact-based, truly literary. However it proves to be laden with the same dilemmas and approaches as earlier books.
From Chance Novelist to Iconic Work
Chris Kraus was originally an artist who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting personal female narrative from humiliation into assassination. She kept producing books, but the following three engaging and challenging novels lacked the power and directness that the correspondence format imparted to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a maverick maker who had evolved into a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It is logical that she now wants to try out new kinds of material, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a time when she asserts that Trumpian politics renders personal narrative obsolete.
Several Eras, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning three generations – all unable to escape their pasts. We encounter the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, relocating from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a community long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.
For this reader drawn to refined literature of the type the author herself typically rejects, I was seduced by the narrative style of the first section.
Being a reader drawn to honed writing of the variety that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the literary tone of the first section. There is a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for trivial aspects, like the pail that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, aided by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a nice toy", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like sweet treats". She tells Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."
Frustration and Disruption
I was destined to be disappointed when I hoped this fresh tone could persist to the end. The author states here that she is annoyed by the satisfaction audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the unpolished style she shares with her inspiration Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels returns in the middle section. The protagonist is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting her husband curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as her spouse cycles through low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a world fueled by the rage and anxiety that drives a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her occupation changed from "novelist" to "landlord" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she states that she's investigating the murder so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an the United States that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even perceive".
The Killing Story
Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the referenced day experienced by the victim with the killer and his associates. The author possesses excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what occurred as Brandon came to see Brittney after connecting via an application where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day with her companions, loitering fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by her romantic interest Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. Yet I wished her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who comes alive partly through the protagonist's connection to her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par
