🔗 Share this article

The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with individuals pursuing clean slates, attempting to leave behind substance abuse or toxic relationships, only to see hope turn into aggression. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into willfully cynical through its repetitions. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" appear throughout the story. And yet, the author herself seems to be making her personal new beginning, because this appears a new kind of book – observational, truly literary. However it turns out to be laden with the same dilemmas and approaches as earlier books.

From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book

Kraus started out as an creative who entered the literary world somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, converting confessional female writing from abjection into assassination. She continued writing, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels did not possess the impact and rawness that the letter form infused into the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a renegade artist who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was significant attention on real estate deals. It makes sense that she now wants to try out different types of content, directing her gaze to the experiences of others, at a moment when she asserts that current political era makes confessional writing redundant.

Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing multiple eras – all unable to escape their pasts. The book includes the tale of characters Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, relocating from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. Additionally the account of Kraus, 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 her husband Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a locality long abandoned by progressive politics only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.

For this reader attracted to polished prose of the sort Kraus often avoids, I was seduced by the narrative style of the opening part.

As someone who reads who appreciates crafted language of the variety that the author tends to eschew, I was captivated by the storytelling approach of the first section. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates trivial aspects, like the container that the young Catt frees from the ice at the opening of the book, assisted by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a nice toy", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like sweet treats". She tells Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was fated to feel let down when I expected this fresh tone could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the enjoyment those who appreciate polished prose have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she echoes from her idol author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works comes back in the second segment. The protagonist is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a society propelled by the hostility and dread that powers Trump's victory. A significant portion discusses about the protagonist facing cancellation on a platform, her occupation changed from "writer" to "landlord" on the online encyclopedia. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. On one occasion she remarks that she's investigating the murder so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her social media opponents would be unable to grasp, would not even see".

The Killing Story

So then we come to the murder itself – and the referenced day experienced by the victim with the perpetrator and his companions. Kraus has great source material, and reconstructs step by step what occurred as a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, mooching around fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

Catt develops an obsession by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partly through Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman derailing in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par