The Four Spent the Day Together centers on individuals seeking clean slates, struggling to escape substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into violence. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", rendering it deliberately jaded through recurring use. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the text. Meanwhile, the author herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, since this seems a new kind of book – documentarian, truly literary. Yet it turns out to be packed with the recurring issues and styles as past novels.
From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work
The writer started out as an visual artist who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating confessional female writing from abjection into defiance. She kept producing books, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the power and directness that the correspondence format infused into the voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her role as a renegade artist who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It follows that she now wants to explore different types of content, turning outward to other people's stories, at a time when she states that Trumpian politics renders personal narrative redundant.
Multiple Generations, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning three generations – none able to break free from their pasts. There is the tale of characters Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, moving from the urban environment to a pastoral setting. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband a man named Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one directionless individual by another in a community largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.
As a reader fond of polished prose of the sort Kraus herself often avoids, I was seduced by the literary tone of the initial segment.
Being a reader who appreciates crafted language of the variety that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the first section. It exhibits a fresh level of observation that makes room for small details, like the pail that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". She tells Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not entirely her own."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was destined to be disappointed when I wished this new voice could last out the book. The author states here that she resents the enjoyment audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her idol author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels comes back in the second segment. Catt Greene is attempting to do up multiple decrepit residences in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help her husband manage his alcohol use. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a environment propelled by the rage and anxiety that powers Trump's victory. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her occupation changed from "novelist" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. On one occasion she states that she's investigating the murder so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would overlook entirely".
The Killing Story
Thus we arrive to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day spent by the deceased with the perpetrator and his friends. Kraus has compelling foundational content, and details moment by moment what occurred as Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, loitering having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.
Obsession and Unfinished Business
The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing wrestle in this part. However, I would have preferred her to delve deeper into her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who comes alive in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par
