The Four Spent the Day Together centers on individuals seeking fresh starts, struggling to escape substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into conflict. Chris Kraus frequently uses the phrase "fresh start", transforming it into deliberately jaded through recurring use. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" recur in the narrative. At the same time, Kraus herself is embarking on her own fresh start, since this presents as a different type of work – fact-based, authentically narrative. However it proves to be packed with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as her previous works.
From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book
Kraus started out as an creative who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating personal female narrative from abjection into rebellion. She kept producing books, but the following three engaging and challenging novels did not possess the power and directness that the epistolary style brought to the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a nonconformist creator who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It is logical that she currently desires to try out new kinds of material, turning outward to other people's stories, at a time when she claims that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing unnecessary.
Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, encompassing several time periods – all unable to escape their pasts. The book includes the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, moving from the urban environment to a pastoral setting. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the persona of Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a town long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.
As a reader attracted to polished prose of the type Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the literary tone of the initial segment.
Being a reader drawn to crafted language of the style that Kraus herself often disregards, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for small details, like the bucket that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."
Frustration and Disruption
I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this new voice could last out the book. The author states here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels comes back in the second segment. Catt is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting Paul manage his alcohol use. She feels helpless as Paul moves between poorly supported positions as an recovery specialist in a society fueled by the hostility and dread that underpins a political win. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her listed profession modified from "author" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. On one occasion she says that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her online critics would not understand, would overlook entirely".
The Killing Story
Then we reach to the actual killing – and the titular day experienced by the victim with the killer and his friends. Kraus utilizes excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what happened when the victim Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day in the company of her associates, loitering getting his car mended and funding treats and narcotics, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. This entire part feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
