The Four Spent the Day Together features protagonists chasing after clean slates, attempting to leave behind drugs or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", rendering it willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the story. Meanwhile, she seems to be making her personal new beginning, because this appears a novel form of writing – documentarian, truly literary. But then it proves to be laden with the recurring issues and approaches as past novels.
From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic
Kraus started out as an artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, transforming personal female narrative from humiliation into rebellion. She kept producing books, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style infused into the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her role as a renegade artist who had turned into a extensive real estate holder, so there was significant attention on housing investments. It follows that she now wants to explore fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a time when she states that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature unnecessary.
Three Generations, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, spanning multiple eras – none able to break free from their backgrounds. There is the story of Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, relocating from the New York borough to a pastoral setting. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one directionless individual by another in a community long abandoned by progressive politics only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.
From my perspective as a reader attracted to refined literature of the type the author herself often avoids, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.
As someone who reads who favors honed writing of the kind that the author tends to eschew, I was won over by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. It possesses a fresh level of observation that makes room for trivial aspects, like the container that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the opening of the book, assisted by her adored dad. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a nice toy", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". The author narrates Emma's narrative with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not entirely her own."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this new voice could continue through the novel. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the pleasure audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to disruption, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works reasserts itself in the middle section. The protagonist is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as her spouse transitions between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a environment driven by the anger and fear that underpins an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she says that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she could potentially understand something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would overlook entirely".
The Homicide Account
So then we come to the homicide in question – and the referenced day passed by the victim with the perpetrator and his friends. Kraus utilizes great source material, and details moment by moment what happened when Brandon came to visit Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, loitering getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being shot by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
Catt develops an obsession by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who comes alive in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman derailing in a struggling, neglected community. The author informs us that Catt speaks to Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels oddly unfinished, to the point that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
