A Look at The Four Spent the Day Together by Chris Kraus – An Iconic Writer Attempts New Ground

The Four Spent the Day Together centers on characters chasing after fresh starts, struggling to escape drugs or toxic relationships, only to see hope turn into conflict. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", making it willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Phrases such as "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the text. And yet, she is embarking on her own fresh start, because this seems a different type of work – observational, truly literary. However it proves to be packed with the familiar conflicts and styles as her previous works.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

The writer started out as an creative who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as missives to a distant beloved, elevating confessional female writing from abjection into assassination. She continued writing, but the following three fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the impact and rawness that the epistolary style infused into the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a renegade artist who had turned into a extensive real estate holder, so there was much discussion on real estate deals. It is logical that she now wants to explore fresh narrative sources, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a time when she claims that Trumpian politics makes confessional writing unnecessary.

Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, encompassing three generations – each trapped by their pasts. We encounter the story of Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, relocating from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband a man named Paul. Finally the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a locality largely deserted by progressive politics only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in a remote part of Minnesota.

As a reader attracted to refined literature of the sort Kraus tends to eschew, I was seduced by the narrative style of the opening part.

Being a reader drawn to precise prose of the kind that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was won over by the literary tone of the initial part. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that makes room for minutiae, like the bucket that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, aided by her cherished parent. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a nice toy", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like hard candy". The author narrates Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."

Frustration and Disruption

I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this fresh tone could persist to the end. The author states here that she dislikes the enjoyment audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disruption, to the unpolished style she echoes from her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books comes back in the second segment. The protagonist is attempting to do up multiple decrepit residences in the city's most challenging districts while moving between two different states, unable to aid Paul manage his alcohol use. She experiences powerlessness as Paul moves between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a world driven by the anger and fear that underpins a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on social media, her professional designation altered from "author" to "property owner" on a reference site. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before leaving Minnesota, "she might be able to learn something about an America that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even perceive".

The Homicide Account

So then we come to the homicide in question – and the referenced day experienced by the deceased with the killer and his friends. The author possesses excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day in the company of her associates, mooching around getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses 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 most interesting character is Brittney, who gains dimension in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par