The Four Spent the Day Together from author Chris Kraus – A Cult Writer Ventures Into Fresh Territory

The Four Spent the Day Together centers on individuals seeking fresh starts, struggling to escape addictions or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into violence. Chris Kraus frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", making it willfully cynical through recurring use. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They opted for a clean break" recur in the text. At the same time, the author herself seems to be making her personal new beginning, as this seems a novel form of writing – observational, authentically narrative. Yet it reveals itself to be laden with the recurring issues and aesthetics as earlier books.

From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic

Kraus began as an visual artist who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting confessional female writing from self-debasement into assassination. She continued writing, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format brought to the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a nonconformist creator who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It is logical that she currently desires to try out different types of content, directing her gaze to other people's stories, at a time when she claims that Trumpian politics makes confessional writing redundant.

Several Eras, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, spanning multiple eras – each trapped by their pasts. There is the tale of Emma and Jasper, versions of Kraus's parents, moving from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. There is the narrative of the author, in the character of Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one directionless individual by another in a town long abandoned by progressive politics only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in rural Minnesota.

As a reader fond of polished prose of the sort Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the narrative style of the initial segment.

Being a reader who appreciates honed writing of the variety that Kraus tends to eschew, I was seduced by the literary tone of the initial part. There is a novel degree of detail that makes room for minutiae, like the container that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language rolling around in their mouths like hard candy". The author narrates the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."

Frustration and Disruption

I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this new voice could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment those who appreciate polished prose have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her past books returns in the middle section. Catt is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting her husband control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a world propelled by the hostility and dread that drives a political win. A significant portion discusses about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "real estate holder" on a reference site. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. In a moment she states that she's looking into the killing so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would be unable to grasp, would overlook entirely".

The Killing Story

So then we come to the homicide in question – and the referenced day spent by the murdered individual with the killer and his associates. Kraus has excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, mooching around getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to go further into her personal fixations here. The standout figure is Brittney, who gains dimension in part due to the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par