The Four Spent the Day Together centers on individuals seeking clean slates, struggling to escape drugs or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", rendering it deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the text. Meanwhile, the author herself seems to be making her own fresh start, since this seems a new kind of book – observational, genuinely novelistic. But then it reveals itself to be laden with the same dilemmas and approaches as earlier books.
From Chance Novelist to Iconic Work
Kraus started out as an visual artist who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, converting confessional female writing from self-debasement into defiance. She continued writing, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels did not possess the power and directness that the letter form imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her role as a renegade artist who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It is logical that she presently aims to explore different types of content, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a time when she claims that current political era turns intimate literature unnecessary.
Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering several time periods – all unable to escape their pasts. We encounter the tale of Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, moving from the urban environment to a pastoral setting. There is the account of Kraus, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction a man named Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a town mostly forsaken by liberal ideals only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.
From my perspective as a reader drawn to refined literature of the kind Kraus often avoids, I was seduced by the literary tone of the opening part.
Being a reader who favors precise prose of the style that the author usually avoids, I was won over by the literary tone of the opening segment. It possesses a fresh level of observation that makes room for small details, like the bucket that the young Catt frees from the ice at the start of the story, helped by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a nice toy", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like sweet treats". She tells the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."
Frustration and Disruption
I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this different style could persist to the end. The author states here that she dislikes the satisfaction readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to disruption, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her idol Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works comes back in the central part. Catt Greene is working on refurbishing three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between Minnesota and LA, unable to aid her husband curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a society fueled by the hostility and dread that powers a political win. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her occupation changed from "writer" to "landlord" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. On one occasion she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her online critics would not understand, would not even perceive".
The Homicide Account
So then we come to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day spent by the victim with the perpetrator and his companions. The author possesses excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what happened when a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she offered adult photos. He sought a sexual encounter but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, wandering about getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt gets obsessed 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 go further into her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who gains dimension partially because of Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
