🔗 Share this article

The Four Spent the Day Together features characters seeking fresh starts, struggling to escape drugs or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", making it deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the text. And yet, the author herself appears to be undertaking her personal new beginning, because this seems a new kind of book – observational, genuinely novelistic. Yet it turns out to be packed with the same dilemmas and approaches as her previous works.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

Chris Kraus was originally an visual artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as missives to a distant beloved, elevating confessional female writing from abjection into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels lacked the impact and rawness that the correspondence format brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a renegade artist who had become a major property owner, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It follows that she presently aims to try out new kinds of material, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a moment when she states that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative redundant.

Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning three generations – each trapped by their backgrounds. We encounter the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, transitioning from the New York borough to a pastoral setting. Then there is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction a man named Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a community long abandoned by progressive politics only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.

For this reader drawn to honed writing of the kind Kraus herself often avoids, I was captivated by the literary tone of the first section.

As someone who reads who favors honed writing of the style that the author tends to eschew, I was won over by the literary tone of the first section. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for minutiae, like the container that the young Catt dislodges from ice at the opening of the book, assisted by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". She tells Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not entirely her own."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was fated to feel let down when I wished this different style could last out the book. The author states here that she is annoyed by the satisfaction audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her inspiration Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels returns in the second segment. Catt Greene is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between two different states, failing to help her husband curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as Paul transitions between poorly supported positions as an recovery specialist in a environment fueled by the rage and anxiety that underpins a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her listed profession modified from "author" to "real estate holder" on a reference site. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. On one occasion she states that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even perceive".

The Homicide Account

Thus we arrive to the actual killing – and the titular day passed by the victim with the killer and his companions. Kraus has excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what transpired when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, wandering about getting his car mended and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt develops an obsession by the narrative, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who comes alive in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par