🔗 Share this article

The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with characters seeking fresh starts, trying to break free from addictions or harmful partnerships, only to witness hope devolve into conflict. Chris Kraus frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", making it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" appear throughout the story. And yet, she seems to be making her personal new beginning, because this presents as a different type of work – observational, truly literary. However it turns out to be laden with the same dilemmas and styles as past novels.

From Accidental Writer to Iconic Work

Kraus began as an creative who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming personal female narrative from humiliation into defiance. She kept producing books, but the following three fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the power and directness that the letter form imparted to the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a renegade artist who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It makes sense that she presently aims to explore new kinds of material, turning outward to other people's stories, at a time when she asserts that Trumpian politics makes confessional writing unnecessary.

Several Eras, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning multiple eras – each trapped by their histories. We encounter the story of Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, transitioning from the New York borough to a pastoral setting. There is the narrative of the author, in the character of Catt Greene, confronting the late recognition of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction a man named Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a town largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.

From my perspective as a reader attracted to honed writing of the type Kraus tends to eschew, I was captivated by the narrative style of the initial segment.

As a reader drawn to crafted language of the variety that the author often disregards, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for trivial aspects, like the container that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the opening of the book, aided by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a nice toy", he answers, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like hard candy". She tells the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "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 fresh tone could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she dislikes the pleasure readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disruption, to the unpolished style she has in common with her idol Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels returns in the middle section. Catt is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid her husband curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a world propelled by the rage and anxiety that underpins Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on social media, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "property owner" on a reference site. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. On one occasion she states that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even see".

The Killing Story

So then we come to the murder itself – and the eponymous day spent by the victim with the killer and his associates. Kraus has great source material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when the victim Brandon came to visit Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He sought a sexual encounter but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, loitering fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has repeatedly received inpatient care for aggressive outbursts.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and reckless transgression tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who gains dimension partly through the protagonist's connection to her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par