A Look at The Four Spent the Day Together from author Chris Kraus – An Iconic Writer Ventures Into Something New

The Four Spent the Day Together features characters chasing after fresh starts, attempting to leave behind substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into violence. Chris Kraus frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into willfully cynical through recurring use. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the story. Meanwhile, Kraus herself appears to be undertaking her own fresh start, because this presents as a new kind of book – observational, truly literary. But then it reveals itself to be filled with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as her previous works.

From Chance Novelist to Iconic Work

Kraus began as an creative who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating confessional female writing from humiliation into assassination. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style imparted to the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a maverick maker who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on housing investments. It follows that she presently aims to try out fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a time when she states that current political era renders personal narrative unnecessary.

Multiple Generations, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, spanning multiple eras – each trapped by their backgrounds. We encounter the story of characters Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, moving from the urban environment to a pastoral setting. There is the account of Kraus, in the persona of Catt Greene, confronting the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her partner struggling with addiction a man named Paul. Finally the narrative of a homicide of one directionless individual by another in a community mostly forsaken by progressive politics only a short distance from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.

For this reader attracted to polished prose of the type Kraus tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the initial segment.

Being a reader who favors crafted language of the kind that the author tends to eschew, I was won over by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. There is a novel degree of detail that makes room for minutiae, like the container that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a great plaything", he answers, "the elliptical meanings of words rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". Kraus writes Emma's story 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 persist to the end. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the pleasure audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels reasserts itself in the second segment. The protagonist is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between two different states, failing to help her husband control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul transitions between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a environment driven by the anger and fear that underpins Trump's victory. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on a platform, her professional designation altered from "author" to "property owner" on a reference site. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. On one occasion she says that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an America that her online critics would not understand, would overlook entirely".

The Homicide Account

So then we come to the actual killing – and the eponymous day spent by the murdered individual with the killer and his companions. Kraus has compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what happened when the victim Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day with her companions, wandering about getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.

Fascination and Incompletion

The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I found myself captivated by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to explore more thoroughly her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who gains dimension in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par