🔗 Share this article

The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with characters seeking fresh starts, struggling to escape drugs or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into violence. Chris Kraus frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", making it deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Phrases such as "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the text. Meanwhile, Kraus herself is embarking on her individual reinvention, because this seems a different type of work – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. But then it proves to be laden with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as past novels.

From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book

The writer started out as an visual artist who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, elevating confessional female writing from abjection into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels lacked the power and directness that the epistolary style infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a maverick maker who had turned into a major property owner, so there was much discussion on real estate deals. It makes sense that she currently desires to try out new kinds of material, turning outward to external narratives, at a period in which she claims that Trumpian politics renders personal narrative obsolete.

Several Eras, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering several time periods – each trapped by their backgrounds. The book includes the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, versions 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 character of Catt Greene, grappling with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one directionless individual by another in a locality largely deserted by progressive politics only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in a remote part of Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader attracted to polished prose of the kind Kraus tends to eschew, I was captivated by the narrative style of the opening part.

Being a reader drawn to honed writing of the kind that Kraus often disregards, I was captivated by the storytelling approach of the initial part. There is a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates small details, like the bucket that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the opening of the book, helped by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a great plaything", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". She tells the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not entirely her own."

Frustration and Disruption

I was fated to feel let down when I expected this different style could last out the book. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment those who appreciate polished prose have derived from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works reasserts itself in the central part. The protagonist is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul manage his alcohol use. She feels helpless as her spouse moves between underfunded jobs as an substance abuse counselor in a environment propelled by the rage and anxiety that powers Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her occupation changed from "author" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment 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 be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".

The Murder Narrative

Then we reach to the actual killing – and the eponymous day spent by the murdered individual with the killer and his associates. Kraus utilizes compelling foundational content, and details moment by moment what happened when Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, loitering fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

Catt develops an obsession by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The standout figure is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partly through Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl spiraling out of control in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par