🔗 Share this article

The Four Spent the Day Together features characters pursuing clean slates, trying to break free from drugs or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into conflict. The author often employs the phrase "fresh start", transforming it into intentionally weary through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the story. Meanwhile, Kraus herself is embarking on her own fresh start, because this seems a new kind of book – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. Yet it proves to be laden with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as past novels.

From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic

Chris Kraus began as an creative who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating intimate women's literature from abjection into assassination. She continued writing, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels missed the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format brought to the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a renegade artist who had become a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It is logical that she now wants to try out new kinds of material, turning outward to the experiences of others, at a time when she states that current political era makes confessional writing unnecessary.

Three Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing multiple eras – none able to break free from their pasts. The book includes the story of characters Emma and Jasper, versions of the author's parents, relocating from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the guise of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a locality long abandoned by liberal ideals only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.

As a reader attracted to refined literature of the kind Kraus herself often avoids, I was seduced by the narrative style of the opening part.

As a reader who favors honed writing of the kind that the author tends to eschew, I was seduced by the literary tone of the initial part. It possesses a novel degree of detail that makes room for minutiae, like the container that the young Catt dislodges from ice at the opening of the book, assisted by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a great plaything", he replies, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like piece 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 hoped this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she resents the satisfaction readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her past books comes back in the central part. The protagonist is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting her husband manage his alcohol use. She experiences powerlessness as Paul moves between poorly supported positions as an recovery specialist in a world driven by the hostility and dread that powers Trump's victory. A significant portion discusses about Catt's social media ostracism on social media, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "real estate holder" on a reference site. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. At one point she says that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she could potentially understand something about an the nation that her social media opponents would fail to comprehend, would overlook entirely".

The Murder Narrative

So then we come to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day passed by the deceased with the murderer and his friends. 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 sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, mooching around having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt develops an obsession by the account, and I found myself captivated by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to delve deeper into her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par