The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with characters chasing after clean slates, attempting to leave behind addictions or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into aggression. Chris Kraus frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" are scattered across the story. At the same time, she seems to be making her own fresh start, as this seems a new kind of book – observational, truly literary. However it reveals itself to be packed with the recurring issues and aesthetics as earlier books.
From Accidental Writer to Iconic Work
Chris Kraus started out as an creative who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating intimate women's literature from humiliation into rebellion. She continued writing, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format brought to the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a nonconformist creator who had evolved into a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It follows that she now wants to try out fresh narrative sources, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a time when she asserts that Trumpian politics makes confessional writing obsolete.
Three Generations, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning several time periods – all unable to escape their histories. We encounter the narrative about Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, relocating from the New York borough to the Connecticut countryside. There is the account of Kraus, in the guise of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. Finally the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a locality largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in a remote part of Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader attracted to honed writing of the sort the author herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the literary tone of the first section.
As someone who reads drawn to precise prose of the variety that Kraus often disregards, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the first section. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for trivial aspects, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child dislodges from ice at the opening of the book, helped by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she exclaims; "a great plaything", he answers, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like sweet treats". The author narrates Emma's narrative with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."
Frustration and Disruption
I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this fresh tone could persist to the end. The author states here that she resents the satisfaction readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she echoes from her idol author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works returns in the central part. Catt Greene is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help her husband manage his alcohol use. She is overwhelmed as her spouse cycles through low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a environment propelled by the rage and anxiety that underpins an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her occupation changed from "novelist" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. On one occasion she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before leaving Minnesota, "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
Then we reach to the murder itself – and the referenced day spent by the deceased with the murderer and his associates. Kraus has excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what occurred as Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she offered adult photos. He sought a sexual encounter but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, mooching around fixing his automobile and funding treats and narcotics, before being shot by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.
Fascination and Incompletion
The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The standout figure is Brittney, who gains dimension partly through Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
