The Four Spent the Day Together features characters chasing after fresh starts, attempting to leave behind drugs or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into violence. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", rendering it willfully cynical through recurring use. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" recur in the text. Meanwhile, she seems to be making her own fresh start, because this appears a novel form of writing – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. But then it reveals itself to be filled with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as her previous works.
From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book
Kraus started out as an artist who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting personal female narrative from self-debasement into assassination. She kept producing books, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the power and directness that the correspondence format brought to the voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her role as a renegade artist who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on real estate deals. It follows that she now wants to try out different types of content, turning outward to external narratives, at a time when she asserts that Trumpian politics renders personal narrative obsolete.
Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, spanning multiple eras – none able to break free from their backgrounds. The book includes the tale of Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, transitioning from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. There is the narrative of the author, in the guise of Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a community mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in rural Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader fond of polished prose of the kind Kraus herself typically rejects, I was seduced by the literary tone of the initial segment.
As someone who reads drawn to honed writing of the style that Kraus tends to eschew, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the initial part. There is a novel degree of detail that accommodates minutiae, like the container that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the opening of the book, aided by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language rolling around in their mouths like sweet treats". She tells the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this fresh tone could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she resents the satisfaction audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books returns in the middle section. The protagonist is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting her husband curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul transitions between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a world driven by the anger and fear that underpins a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on social media, her listed profession modified from "writer" to "landlord" on a reference site. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. In a moment she says that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an America that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even perceive".
The Homicide Account
Then we reach to the actual killing – and the titular day experienced by the victim with the murderer and his associates. Kraus utilizes great source material, and knows hour by hour what occurred as a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after connecting via an application where she offered adult photos. He sought a sexual encounter but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, loitering getting his car mended and funding treats and narcotics, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
