The Four Spent the Day Together by Chris Kraus – An Iconic Writer Attempts Something New

This latest work centers on characters chasing after fresh starts, struggling to escape substance abuse or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into violence. Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", making it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Examples include "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the text. At the same time, Kraus herself is embarking on her personal new beginning, since this presents as a different type of work – observational, authentically narrative. Yet it reveals itself to be filled with the familiar conflicts and styles as earlier books.

From Chance Novelist to Iconic Work

The writer started out as an visual artist who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, transforming intimate women's literature from humiliation into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the following three fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the power and directness that the letter form brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a renegade artist who had turned into a major property owner, so there was significant attention on housing investments. It makes sense that she now wants to try out new kinds of material, directing her gaze to the experiences of others, at a time when she states that current political era renders personal narrative unnecessary.

Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing several time periods – all unable to escape their histories. We encounter the narrative about Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, relocating from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. Additionally the narrative of the author, in the guise of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a town largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader attracted to polished prose of the sort Kraus herself typically rejects, I was captivated by the narrative style of the initial segment.

As someone who reads who appreciates precise prose of the kind that the author tends to eschew, I was won over by the literary tone of the first section. There is a fresh level of observation that makes room for small details, 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. "Look, an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a nice toy", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". The author narrates Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not entirely her own."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was destined to be disappointed when I wished this fresh tone could continue through the novel. The author states here that she dislikes the pleasure audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she shares with her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels reasserts itself in the central part. Catt Greene is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a society fueled by the anger and fear that drives a political win. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "author" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. At one point she remarks that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would fail to comprehend, would overlook entirely".

The Killing Story

So then we come to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day spent by the murdered individual with the murderer and his friends. Kraus has great source material, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after connecting via an application where she offered adult photos. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, mooching around getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I found myself captivated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The standout figure is Brittney herself, who gains dimension partly through Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par