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The Four Spent the Day Together features individuals seeking clean slates, attempting to leave behind drugs or toxic relationships, only to witness hope devolve into violence. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "new beginning", making it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the text. Meanwhile, she appears to be undertaking her own fresh start, as this appears a different type of work – documentarian, authentically narrative. However it turns out to be laden with the familiar conflicts and styles as past novels.

From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic

Chris Kraus was originally an creative who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, elevating confessional female writing from abjection into assassination. She continued writing, but the following three fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the impact and rawness that the letter form brought to the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her role as a maverick maker who had evolved into a extensive real estate holder, so there was much discussion on real estate deals. It follows that she currently desires to explore different types of content, turning outward to the experiences of others, at a moment when she states that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative redundant.

Multiple Generations, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning multiple eras – all unable to escape their pasts. We encounter the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, moving from the urban environment to a pastoral setting. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the persona of Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction a man named Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a locality long abandoned by progressive politics only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader fond of polished prose of the kind the author herself typically rejects, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.

As someone who reads who favors honed writing of the style that the author usually avoids, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the first section. It possesses a fresh level of observation that accommodates minutiae, like the container that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her adored dad. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a great plaything", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". The author narrates Emma's story with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this different style could continue through the novel. The author states here that she dislikes the enjoyment audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disruption, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her hero author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books returns in the second segment. The protagonist is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a environment propelled by the hostility and dread that drives Trump's victory. A significant portion discusses about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her occupation changed from "author" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she says that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her online critics would not understand, would not even perceive".

The Killing Story

Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the titular day spent by the murdered individual with the murderer and his associates. Kraus has excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what happened when Brandon came to visit Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day in the company of her associates, loitering having his vehicle repaired and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for aggressive outbursts.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partially because of the protagonist's connection to her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman spiraling out of control in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the point that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par