Four Spent the Day Together
{{The Four Spent the Day Together}}
Basic Info
- Author: Chris Kraus
- Year: 2025
- Type: #primary2
Summary (brief)
-I’m reading The Four Spent the Day Together (2025) by Chris Kraus, and it reminds me of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1960), because both books are about the horrors of everyday life: mundanity, abuse, misfortune, addiction, blacksheepness, domesticity, and yearning—for what? Anything but this. The Four Spent the Day Together is about Catt Greene, Kraus’s author avatar, growing up as an outcast, becoming a writer, marrying Paul—an alcoholic, and investigating a murder.
Rabbit, Run is about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom—a guy who went from being a high school basketball superstar to a disillusioned salesman, trapped in his boring life with a pregnant wife and young son. He runs off to have an affair with a prostitute, whom he impregnates. Meanwhile, his new daughter is born. Rabbit says, You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
People often project their own assumptions, but the truth is that our interior lives are so deep under the surface that we often don’t even understand our own motivations. Like Natalie Portman says: nobody knows exactly how you feel. Paul describes what happens when he starts drinking again after a period of sobriety: it always starts with a plan. Once the plan is in motion, there’s no stopping it.
There is also such a pick-me-ness to Kraus' author avatar. She just lets this alcoholic abuse her for years. She depicts herself as forgiving and compassionate, but she actually just looks like a doormat. What is her intention?
Major Themes
Key Passages / Quotes
Quote 1
quote:: “.”
page:: 197
themes:: freedom, identity
Genre Notes
Characters / Concepts (if relevant)
-Catt Greene: author avatar - LA-based writer who buys a summer home in Minnesota; interested in local homicide
-Paul Garcia: Catt's husband; an addiction therapist and recovering alcoholic who relapses violently all the time
-Emma and Jasper: Catt's parents; Depression-era survivors; built an aspirational lifestyle in blue-collar Milford, Connecticut.
-Three teenagers: anonymous figures; disassociated, isolated youths
Theory Connections
Related Texts
My Argument / Interpretation
Dissertation Relevance
How could this matter to my project?
-deconstructs genre hybridity
-the ethics of the gaze
-addiction