The Four Spent the Day Together features individuals seeking fresh starts, struggling to escape substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into aggression. The author often employs the phrase "clean slate", making it intentionally weary through recurring use. Phrases such as "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the story. And yet, the author herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, as this presents as a different type of work – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. However it proves to be packed with the recurring issues and approaches as earlier books.
From Chance Novelist to Iconic Work
Chris Kraus began as an artist who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, structured as epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating confessional female writing from abjection into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the following three fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the impact and rawness that the epistolary style brought to the voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her position as a maverick maker who had turned into a extensive real estate holder, so there was significant attention on housing investments. It is logical that she now wants to experiment with fresh narrative sources, turning outward to external narratives, at a time when she asserts that contemporary political climate turns intimate literature obsolete.
Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering three generations – each trapped by their backgrounds. There is the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, transitioning from the New York borough to the Connecticut countryside. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her partner struggling with addiction her husband Paul. Finally the story of the murder of one directionless individual by another in a town mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader fond of honed writing of the sort Kraus herself typically rejects, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.
As a reader who appreciates crafted language of the style that Kraus usually avoids, I was won over by the literary tone of the initial part. There is a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates minutiae, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, assisted by her adored dad. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". She tells Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not entirely her own."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was fated to feel let down when I expected this fresh tone could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she dislikes the enjoyment audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her idol Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books returns in the middle section. Catt is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help her husband curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a world fueled by the anger and fear that powers Trump's victory. A significant portion discusses about Catt's social media ostracism on social media, her occupation changed from "writer" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she states that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an America that her Twitter detractors would be unable to grasp, would not even see".
The Homicide Account
So then we come to the actual killing – and the eponymous day passed by the deceased with the perpetrator and his friends. The author possesses excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what occurred as a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but seems affably to have spent the day in the company of her associates, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her individual preoccupations here. The standout figure is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partly through 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 detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par
