The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with individuals chasing after clean slates, attempting to leave behind addictions or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into aggression. The author often employs the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the text. At the same time, Kraus herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, since this appears a different type of work – observational, truly literary. Yet it turns out to be laden with the familiar conflicts and styles as past novels.
From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book
Chris Kraus started out as an artist who entered the literary world somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting intimate women's literature from abjection into defiance. She continued writing, but the following three fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her role as a renegade artist who had evolved into a extensive real estate holder, so there was significant attention on real estate deals. It is logical that she now wants to experiment with different types of content, turning outward to the experiences of others, at a period in which she claims that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative unnecessary.
Several Eras, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing multiple eras – none able to break free from their backgrounds. The book includes the narrative about Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, relocating from the Bronx to a pastoral setting. There is the narrative of the author, in the character of Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a locality largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.
As a reader fond of polished prose of the kind the author herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the literary tone of the opening part.
As someone who reads drawn to precise prose of the style that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the first section. It possesses a fresh level of observation that makes room for trivial aspects, like the container that the protagonist as a child dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like sweet treats". The author narrates Emma's narrative with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this new voice could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the satisfaction audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her idol author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels comes back in the central part. Catt Greene is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in the city's most challenging districts while moving between Minnesota and LA, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul transitions 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's social media ostracism on social media, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she states that she's looking into the killing so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an America that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even see".
The Killing Story
So then we come to the murder itself – and the eponymous day passed by the victim with the perpetrator and his companions. Kraus has excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when the victim Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He sought a sexual encounter but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, mooching around having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has repeatedly received inpatient care for aggressive outbursts.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I found myself captivated by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her own obsessions here. The standout figure is Brittney, who gains dimension in part due to Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. The author informs us that Catt speaks to Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
