This latest work is populated with characters pursuing fresh starts, attempting to leave behind addictions or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", making it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Examples include "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the story. At the same time, Kraus herself seems to be making her personal new beginning, since this presents as a novel form of writing – fact-based, authentically narrative. Yet it turns out to be filled with the same dilemmas and approaches as earlier books.
From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic
The writer began as an artist who transitioned to writing unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, transforming personal female narrative from humiliation into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the following three engaging and challenging novels lacked the impact and rawness that the letter form infused into the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her role as a maverick maker who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It is logical that she presently aims to experiment with different types of content, turning outward to external narratives, at a time when she states that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature redundant.
Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, spanning three generations – none able to break free from their histories. There is the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, transitioning from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her partner struggling with addiction a man named Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a locality mostly forsaken by progressive politics only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader fond of honed writing of the type Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the narrative style of the first section.
As a reader who favors precise prose of the kind that Kraus usually avoids, I was seduced by the literary tone of the first section. There is a novel degree of detail that makes room for minutiae, like the container that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the opening of the book, helped by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a nice toy", he replies, "the nuanced interpretations of terms tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". The author narrates Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the pleasure audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she has in common with her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works comes back in the middle section. Catt Greene is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help her husband control his drinking. She feels helpless as her spouse moves between underfunded jobs as an substance abuse counselor in a society propelled by the rage and anxiety that powers a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on a platform, her occupation changed from "novelist" to "landlord" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she says 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 be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".
The Homicide Account
So then we come to the murder itself – and the eponymous day experienced by the victim with the perpetrator and his associates. Kraus has excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what happened when a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, wandering about fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who becomes vivid in part due to the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
