A Look at The Four Spent the Day Together from Chris Kraus – A Renowned Writer Attempts New Ground
This latest work features characters seeking fresh starts, struggling to escape addictions or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Kraus frequently uses the phrase "new beginning", transforming it into intentionally weary through its repetitions. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the story. At the same time, she seems to be making her own fresh start, because this presents as a new kind of book – observational, authentically narrative. However it turns out to be laden with the same dilemmas and styles as past novels.
From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book
Kraus was originally an artist who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating confessional female writing from abjection into assassination. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels lacked the power and directness that the correspondence format brought to the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a renegade artist who had become a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It follows that she presently aims to try out new kinds of material, directing her gaze to other people's stories, at a moment when she claims that current political era turns intimate literature obsolete.
Multiple Generations, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering multiple eras – none able to break free from their backgrounds. There is the story of characters Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, transitioning from the Bronx to a pastoral setting. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. The third thread involves the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a community mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.
For this reader attracted to refined literature of the sort the author herself typically rejects, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.
Being a reader drawn to crafted language of the kind that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. There is a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for trivial aspects, like the container that the protagonist as a child dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her adored dad. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a great plaything", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like hard candy". Kraus writes Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."
Frustration and Disruption
I was fated to feel let down when I hoped this different style could last out the book. The author states here that she resents the pleasure audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disruption, to the unpolished style she echoes from her hero author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her past books returns in the second segment. Catt Greene is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a world fueled by the anger and fear that drives a political win. A significant portion discusses about Catt being cancelled on social media, her listed profession modified from "writer" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. On one occasion she says that she's looking into the killing so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn something about an America that her social media opponents would not understand, would not even perceive".
The Murder Narrative
Thus we arrive to the actual killing – and the eponymous day spent by the murdered individual with the murderer and his friends. Kraus utilizes great source 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 marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, loitering getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
Catt develops an obsession by the story, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who comes alive partly through the protagonist's connection to her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
