🔗 Share this article

The Four Spent the Day Together features individuals chasing after new beginnings, attempting to leave behind drugs or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into conflict. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", rendering it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They opted for a clean break" recur in the narrative. And yet, the author herself appears to be undertaking her personal new beginning, because this appears a new kind of book – fact-based, authentically narrative. However it turns out to be laden with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as past novels.

From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic

Chris Kraus started out as an creative who entered the literary world somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, converting personal female narrative from humiliation into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the impact and rawness that the epistolary style imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a maverick maker who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It follows that she now wants to try out different types of content, turning outward to the experiences of others, at a period in which she states that current political era makes confessional writing obsolete.

Three Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, spanning three generations – all unable to escape their pasts. We encounter the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, versions of the author's parents, moving from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, confronting the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction her husband Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one troubled youth by another in a community mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.

As a reader fond of polished prose of the kind Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the literary tone of the first section.

As someone who reads who favors crafted language of the style that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the initial part. There is a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for minutiae, like the pail that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the start of the story, assisted by her adored dad. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a nice toy", he answers, "the nuanced interpretations of terms rolling around in their mouths like sweet treats". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not entirely her own."

Frustration and Disruption

I was fated to feel let down when I wished this fresh tone could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the satisfaction readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she has in common with her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works comes back in the central part. The protagonist is working on refurbishing multiple decrepit residences in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while moving between Minnesota and LA, unsuccessful in assisting her husband curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a society fueled by the anger and fear that drives a political win. A significant portion discusses about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. On one occasion she remarks that she's investigating the murder so that before exiting the region, "she could potentially understand something about an America that her social media opponents would fail to comprehend, would overlook entirely".

The Murder Narrative

So then we come to the murder itself – and the eponymous day spent by the victim with the killer and his companions. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and details moment by moment what happened when Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day in the company of her associates, loitering having his vehicle repaired and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.

Fascination and Incompletion

The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who becomes vivid in part due to the protagonist's connection to her – another bright, bullied girl spiraling out of control in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par