The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with characters chasing after clean slates, struggling to escape substance abuse or harmful partnerships, only to see hope turn into aggression. The author often employs the phrase "fresh start", rendering it willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" appear throughout the text. And yet, the author herself appears to be undertaking her personal new beginning, since this appears a new kind of book – fact-based, truly literary. Yet it turns out to be laden with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as past novels.
From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work
Kraus began as an creative who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, elevating confessional female writing from humiliation into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style brought to the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a nonconformist creator who had evolved into a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It is logical that she presently aims to experiment with new kinds of material, turning outward to external narratives, at a moment when she claims that Trumpian politics makes confessional writing redundant.
Multiple Generations, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, encompassing several time periods – all unable to escape their backgrounds. We encounter the tale of Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, moving from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. There is the account of Kraus, in the character of protagonist Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a community long abandoned by progressive politics only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in a remote part of Minnesota.
For this reader drawn to polished prose of the type the author herself tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the first section.
As a reader who favors crafted language of the variety that Kraus tends to eschew, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the first section. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates small details, like the pail that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the start of the story, assisted by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the nuanced interpretations of terms rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". The author narrates Emma's story with interest and closeness. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not entirely her own."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this fresh tone could last out the book. Kraus says here that she dislikes the enjoyment audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the unpolished style she shares with her inspiration Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her past books comes back in the middle section. Catt is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between two different states, failing to help Paul control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a world driven by the hostility and dread that powers a political win. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on social media, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "real estate holder" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before exiting the region, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would fail to comprehend, would overlook entirely".
The Killing Story
Then we reach to the murder itself – and the eponymous day spent by the victim with the killer and his friends. Kraus utilizes excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what occurred as the victim Brandon came to meet Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, mooching around having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being shot by Brittney's partner Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
Catt develops an obsession by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to delve deeper into her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par
