The Four Spent the Day Together centers on individuals pursuing fresh starts, struggling to escape drugs or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into violence. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", rendering it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" recur in the narrative. At the same time, Kraus herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, as this seems a novel form of writing – observational, truly literary. However it turns out to be packed with the recurring issues and approaches as past novels.
From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work
The writer started out as an artist who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating confessional female writing from humiliation into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels missed the power and directness that the correspondence format infused into the voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a nonconformist creator who had become a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It makes sense that she currently desires to explore different types of content, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a time when she asserts that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature redundant.
Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning several time periods – none able to break free from their histories. There is the story of Emma and Jasper, versions of Kraus's parents, relocating from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband Paul. Finally the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a locality long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader attracted to refined literature of the type Kraus tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the initial segment.
Being a reader drawn to precise prose of the kind that Kraus often disregards, I was captivated by the literary tone of the opening segment. It possesses a novel degree of detail that accommodates small details, like the container that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, helped by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a nice toy", he answers, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like piece candy". She tells the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."
Frustration and Disruption
I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this different style could persist to the end. The author states here that she dislikes the satisfaction those who appreciate polished prose have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she has in common with her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels reasserts itself in the middle section. The protagonist is working on refurbishing three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting Paul curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a environment driven by the anger and fear that underpins an electoral success. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "landlord" on a reference site. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. At one point she states that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she might be able to learn something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even see".
The Killing Story
Then we reach to the actual killing – and the referenced day experienced by the victim with the murderer and his friends. Kraus utilizes excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what occurred as Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, wandering about fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by her romantic interest Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for aggressive outbursts.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who gains dimension partly through Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the point that her narrative ends almost mid-par
