🔗 Share this article

The Four Spent the Day Together features protagonists chasing after new beginnings, trying to break free from drugs or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into violence. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "new beginning", making it intentionally weary through its repetitions. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the story. At the same time, Kraus herself is embarking on her own fresh start, because this presents as a different type of work – observational, genuinely novelistic. But then it proves to be filled with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as earlier books.

From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic

Chris Kraus started out as an creative who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, converting personal female narrative from self-debasement into assassination. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her role as a maverick maker who had become a major property owner, so there was much discussion on real estate deals. It follows that she currently desires to experiment with fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a period in which she states that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative unnecessary.

Three Generations, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, encompassing three generations – none able to break free from their pasts. There is the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, moving from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. Then there is the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one directionless individual by another in a locality largely deserted by liberal ideals only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.

For this reader drawn to honed writing of the sort Kraus typically rejects, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the first section.

As a reader who favors precise prose of the variety that the author tends to eschew, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the initial part. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that allows space for trivial aspects, like the bucket that the young Catt frees from the ice at the opening of the book, assisted by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a great plaything", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like sweet treats". She tells the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not entirely her own."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this different style could continue through the novel. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment those who appreciate polished prose have taken 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 blankness and repetitiveness of her past books reasserts itself in the middle section. The protagonist is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting Paul manage his alcohol use. She feels helpless as her spouse moves between low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a environment driven by the hostility and dread that powers Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "property owner" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to be overly concerned 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 the United States that her social media opponents would not understand, would not even see".

The Murder Narrative

Then we reach to the murder itself – and the referenced day spent by the victim with the perpetrator and his companions. Kraus utilizes excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when the victim Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, mooching around getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who comes alive in part due to Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels oddly unfinished, to the point that her narrative ends almost mid-par