🔗 Share this article

The Four Spent the Day Together features individuals seeking fresh starts, struggling to escape substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into violence. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", making it willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the story. At the same time, she appears to be undertaking her own fresh start, since this presents as a novel form of writing – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. However it proves to be laden with the recurring issues and styles as her previous works.

From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic

Chris Kraus was originally an creative who entered the literary world somewhat by chance with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating confessional female writing from self-debasement into defiance. She continued writing, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the impact and rawness that the epistolary style brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a renegade artist who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It makes sense that she now wants to explore different types of content, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a period in which she asserts that Trumpian politics makes confessional writing redundant.

Several Eras, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning several time periods – none able to break free from their histories. We encounter the narrative about Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, transitioning from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. There is the account of Kraus, in the persona of Catt Greene, confronting the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a town long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only 80 miles from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.

As a reader attracted to polished prose of the kind Kraus herself typically rejects, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the first section.

As a reader who favors precise prose of the kind that Kraus tends to eschew, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for minutiae, like the pail that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like piece candy". She tells Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this fresh tone could continue through the novel. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment those who appreciate polished prose have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disruption, to the untidy aesthetics she has in common with her hero Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her past books comes back in the middle section. The protagonist is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between two different states, failing to help her husband control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a world driven by the hostility and dread that drives Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she says that she's investigating the murder so that before exiting the region, "she could potentially understand something about an America that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even see".

The Killing Story

Thus we arrive to the homicide in question – and the titular day experienced by the victim with the killer and his companions. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what happened when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, wandering about getting his car mended and funding treats and narcotics, before being shot by Brittney's partner Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

The protagonist becomes fixated 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. Yet I wished her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The standout figure is Brittney, who comes alive partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the extent that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par