The Four Spent the Day Together features individuals seeking new beginnings, trying to break free from drugs or toxic relationships, only to see hope turn into aggression. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", making it willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Examples include "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the story. Meanwhile, she seems to be making her personal new beginning, because this seems a different type of work – fact-based, authentically narrative. But then it reveals itself to be filled with the familiar conflicts and styles as earlier books.
From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book
Kraus started out as an visual artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming confessional female writing from abjection into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style brought to the voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a renegade artist who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It makes sense that she presently aims to experiment with fresh narrative sources, directing her gaze to other people's stories, at a period in which she states that Trumpian politics makes confessional writing unnecessary.
Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing several time periods – all unable to escape their pasts. The book includes the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, transitioning from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. Additionally the narrative of the author, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. The third thread involves the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a town long abandoned by progressive politics only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.
As a reader fond of refined literature of the type Kraus herself typically rejects, I was captivated by the literary tone of the opening part.
As a reader who appreciates crafted language of the kind that the author often disregards, I was captivated by the literary tone of the first section. There is a novel degree of detail that makes room for minutiae, like the bucket that the young Catt frees from the ice at the opening of the book, helped by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a nice toy", he answers, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". Kraus writes Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was fated to feel let down when I expected this different style could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the satisfaction readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her idol author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels comes back in the central part. Catt Greene is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between Minnesota and LA, unsuccessful in assisting Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul cycles through poorly supported positions as an substance abuse counselor in a world driven by the anger and fear that powers a political win. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "author" to "landlord" on a reference site. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. On one occasion she states that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an America that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even see".
The Killing Story
Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the referenced day passed by the murdered individual with the murderer and his friends. Kraus has excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what transpired when Brandon came to visit Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. 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 covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by her romantic interest Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to go further into her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who gains dimension partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
