The Four Spent the Day Together features individuals chasing after fresh starts, struggling to escape addictions or toxic relationships, only to witness hope devolve into conflict. The author often employs the phrase "fresh start", making it willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the story. At the same time, she appears to be undertaking her personal new beginning, as this appears a new kind of book – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. But then it turns out to be laden with the recurring issues and approaches as earlier books.
From Chance Novelist to Iconic Work
Kraus started out as an visual artist who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating intimate women's literature from humiliation into rebellion. She kept producing books, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the letter form infused into the voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a renegade artist who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It makes sense that she currently desires to experiment with different types of content, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a period in which she claims that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature redundant.
Three Generations, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, encompassing several time periods – each trapped by their histories. There is the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, versions of the author's parents, transitioning from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one troubled youth by another in a locality mostly forsaken by progressive politics only a short distance from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.
From my perspective as a reader drawn to polished prose of the kind Kraus herself often avoids, I was captivated by the literary tone of the initial segment.
As someone who reads who appreciates honed writing of the variety that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. There is a novel degree of detail that accommodates small details, like the pail that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a nice toy", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like hard candy". Kraus writes Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this fresh tone could continue through the novel. The author states here that she resents the enjoyment readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her idol author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels reasserts itself in the second segment. The protagonist is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between two different states, failing to help Paul control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a world driven by the hostility and dread that underpins an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her occupation changed from "writer" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her social media opponents would not understand, would overlook entirely".
The Homicide Account
Thus we arrive to the actual killing – and the eponymous day experienced by the murdered individual with the killer and his companions. Kraus utilizes excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what occurred as Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she offered adult photos. He sought a sexual encounter but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, wandering about fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being shot by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has repeatedly received inpatient care for aggressive outbursts.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through the protagonist's connection to her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
