The Four Spent the Day Together features protagonists chasing after fresh starts, trying to break free from drugs or toxic relationships, only to see hope turn into aggression. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", rendering it willfully cynical through recurring use. Phrases such as "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the narrative. And yet, she is embarking on her own fresh start, as this appears a different type of work – observational, truly literary. But then it reveals itself to be laden with the same dilemmas and styles as earlier books.
From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book
Chris Kraus started out as an visual artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as missives to a distant beloved, elevating confessional female writing from abjection into defiance. She continued writing, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format infused into the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a nonconformist creator who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It makes sense that she presently aims to explore different types of content, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a period in which she claims that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative obsolete.
Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering several time periods – all unable to escape their histories. The book includes the narrative about Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, moving from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. Additionally the narrative of the author, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a town largely deserted by liberal ideals only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.
As a reader fond of refined literature of the type Kraus tends to eschew, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the opening part.
Being a reader who favors crafted language of the style that Kraus tends to eschew, I was seduced by the literary tone of the initial part. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that makes room for small details, like the container that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the start of the story, aided by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a nice toy", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms rolling around in their mouths like hard candy". The author narrates the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."
Frustration and Disruption
I was fated to feel let down when I hoped this fresh tone could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she dislikes the pleasure readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disruption, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels comes back in the central part. Catt is attempting to do up multiple decrepit residences in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid Paul control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul moves between poorly supported positions as an substance abuse counselor in a society propelled by the anger and fear that powers a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her occupation changed from "author" to "property owner" on a reference site. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. At one point she says that she's looking into the killing so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her social media opponents would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".
The Murder Narrative
So then we come to the murder itself – and the eponymous day spent by the murdered individual with the killer and his friends. Kraus utilizes great source material, and knows hour by hour what transpired when the victim Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day with her companions, mooching around getting his car mended and funding treats and narcotics, before being murdered by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. Yet I wished her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who gains dimension partially because of Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. The author informs us that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
