🔗 Share this article

The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with protagonists seeking fresh starts, struggling to escape substance abuse or toxic relationships, only to see hope turn into violence. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "new beginning", making it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the narrative. And yet, the author herself appears to be undertaking her own fresh start, since this seems a novel form of writing – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. But then it reveals itself to be packed with the same dilemmas and approaches as earlier books.

From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book

The writer started out as an artist who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, converting confessional female writing from humiliation into defiance. She continued writing, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels missed the impact and rawness that the epistolary style imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a maverick maker who had evolved into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It is logical that she presently aims to experiment with different types of content, turning outward to other people's stories, at a moment when she asserts that current political era turns intimate literature unnecessary.

Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning several time periods – each trapped by their backgrounds. The book includes the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, versions of Kraus's parents, moving from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the guise of protagonist Catt Greene, confronting the late recognition of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband her husband Paul. Finally the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a town mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from the protagonist's home in rural Minnesota.

For this reader fond of polished prose of the type Kraus typically rejects, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the first section.

Being a reader who appreciates precise prose of the style that Kraus often disregards, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for small details, like the container that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". She tells 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 last out the book. Kraus notes here that she resents the pleasure readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her past books reasserts itself in the second segment. Catt is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between Minnesota and LA, unsuccessful in assisting Paul control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a society propelled by the hostility and dread that drives a political win. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her occupation changed from "novelist" to "real estate holder" on a reference site. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she says that she's investigating the murder so that before departing the state, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".

The Homicide Account

Thus we arrive to the homicide in question – and the referenced day experienced by the deceased with the killer and his companions. Kraus has excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what occurred as the victim Brandon came to visit Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day in the company of her associates, loitering getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting 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 gains dimension partly through Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par