🔗 Share this article

The Four Spent the Day Together centers on protagonists chasing after new beginnings, attempting to leave behind addictions or harmful partnerships, only to see hope turn into conflict. The author frequently uses the phrase "fresh start", rendering it deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the narrative. At the same time, Kraus herself seems to be making her personal new beginning, as this presents as a new kind of book – documentarian, authentically narrative. Yet it turns out to be packed with the same dilemmas and styles as her previous works.

From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book

Chris Kraus started out as an creative who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, transforming confessional female writing from self-debasement into assassination. She continued writing, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels missed the impact and rawness that the correspondence format infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her position as a maverick maker who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It follows that she presently aims to experiment with fresh narrative sources, turning outward to other people's stories, at a moment when she asserts that Trumpian politics makes confessional writing obsolete.

Several Eras, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering several time periods – all unable to escape their pasts. We encounter the narrative about Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, moving from the New York borough to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a locality mostly forsaken by progressive politics only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in rural Minnesota.

For this reader attracted to refined literature of the kind Kraus tends to eschew, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.

As a reader drawn to honed writing of the variety that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the literary tone of the first section. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for trivial aspects, like the container that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her cherished parent. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the nuanced interpretations of terms rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". She tells the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was fated to feel let down when I expected this different style could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the pleasure readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to disruption, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books comes back in the middle section. The protagonist is working on refurbishing multiple decrepit residences in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid Paul control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as her spouse moves between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a environment fueled by the hostility and dread that powers a political win. A significant portion discusses about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "landlord" on the online encyclopedia. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she states that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her social media opponents would fail to comprehend, would not even see".

The Homicide Account

So then we come to the murder itself – and the referenced day spent by the victim with the killer and his friends. Kraus utilizes great source material, and details moment by moment what transpired when a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, loitering having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who gains dimension partly through Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par