Exploring The Four Spent the Day Together by Chris Kraus – An Iconic Writer Attempts New Ground

The Four Spent the Day Together features individuals chasing after fresh starts, struggling to escape addictions or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into violence. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", rendering it deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the narrative. And yet, she is embarking on her personal new beginning, as this appears a novel form of writing – observational, truly literary. However it proves to be packed with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as past novels.

From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book

Kraus began as an creative who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, transforming confessional female writing from abjection into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the impact and rawness that the letter form infused into the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a renegade artist who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It makes sense that she now wants to try out fresh narrative sources, turning outward to the experiences of others, at a time when she states that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature unnecessary.

Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing several time periods – none able to break free from their pasts. We encounter the story of Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, transitioning from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. Finally the story of the murder of one troubled youth by another in a town long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader drawn to honed writing of the type Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.

As someone who reads drawn to precise prose of the style that the author usually avoids, I was won over by the literary tone of the first section. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that allows space for minutiae, like the container that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her adored dad. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a great plaything", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like piece candy". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this different style could last out the book. The author states here that she dislikes the satisfaction those who appreciate polished prose have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she has in common with her idol author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels reasserts itself in the middle section. The protagonist is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a society propelled by the hostility and dread that drives an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her listed profession modified from "author" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. On one occasion she remarks that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would not even see".

The Killing Story

Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the referenced day passed by the deceased with the killer and his friends. Kraus utilizes compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, loitering getting his car mended and funding treats and narcotics, before being shot by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

Catt develops an obsession by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to explore more thoroughly her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partially because of the protagonist's connection to her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman spiraling out of control in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that Catt speaks to Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par