The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with individuals chasing after fresh starts, attempting to leave behind drugs or toxic relationships, only to witness hope devolve into violence. The author frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into deliberately jaded through recurring use. Phrases such as "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the narrative. And yet, the author herself is embarking on her individual reinvention, because this presents as a novel form of writing – documentarian, truly literary. However it reveals itself to be filled with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as earlier books.
From Accidental Writer to Iconic Work
Kraus was originally an creative who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, elevating confessional female writing from humiliation into assassination. She kept producing books, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the power and directness that the epistolary style brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a renegade artist who had turned into a extensive real estate holder, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It makes sense that she now wants to explore new kinds of material, turning outward to external narratives, at a period in which she states that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative unnecessary.
Three Generations, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering multiple eras – all unable to escape their backgrounds. There is the tale of characters Emma and Jasper, versions of the author's parents, moving from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a community mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in rural Minnesota.
As a reader fond of refined literature of the kind Kraus typically rejects, I was captivated by the narrative style of the initial segment.
Being a reader drawn to honed writing of the style that the author tends to eschew, I was captivated by the literary tone of the initial part. There is a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for small details, like the pail that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, assisted by her adored dad. "I found an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a great plaything", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language rolling around in their mouths like hard candy". She tells the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not entirely her own."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was fated to feel let down when I wished this new voice could continue through the novel. Kraus says here that she resents the pleasure readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels comes back in the central part. Catt Greene is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between two different states, unable to aid Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul moves between underfunded jobs as an substance abuse counselor in a world driven by the hostility and dread that underpins Trump's victory. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her listed profession modified from "writer" to "landlord" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she remarks that she's investigating the murder so that before exiting the region, "she could potentially understand something about an America that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even perceive".
The Killing Story
Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the referenced day passed by the murdered individual with the killer and his companions. The author possesses excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what transpired when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day with her companions, loitering fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who gains dimension partly through the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
