The Four Spent the Day Together features individuals chasing after clean slates, struggling to escape addictions or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into conflict. Kraus often employs the phrase "fresh start", transforming it into deliberately jaded through recurring use. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the narrative. And yet, Kraus herself is embarking on her personal new beginning, since this presents as a new kind of book – observational, truly literary. Yet it reveals itself to be packed with the recurring issues and aesthetics as her previous works.
From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic
Kraus started out as an visual artist who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as missives to a distant beloved, elevating confessional female writing from abjection into defiance. She continued writing, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the impact and rawness that the correspondence format brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity 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 currently desires to try out fresh narrative sources, turning outward to external narratives, at a moment when she states that Trumpian politics makes confessional writing obsolete.
Several Eras, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, encompassing multiple eras – all unable to escape their pasts. There is the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, moving from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one troubled youth by another in a community mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader attracted to refined literature of the kind Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the first section.
As someone who reads who favors precise prose of the kind that Kraus herself often disregards, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. There is a fresh level of observation that accommodates minutiae, like the pail that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the opening of the book, assisted by her adored dad. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a nice toy", he replies, "the nuanced interpretations of terms rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". She tells the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not entirely her own."
Frustration and Disruption
I was fated to feel let down when I expected this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the unpolished style she shares with her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her past books comes back in the middle section. Catt Greene is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between Minnesota and LA, unable to aid Paul control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a society propelled by the rage and anxiety that underpins Trump's victory. A significant portion discusses about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her listed profession modified from "writer" to "landlord" on a reference site. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she says that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she could potentially understand something about an America that her social media opponents would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".
The Homicide Account
Thus we arrive to the homicide in question – and the referenced day experienced by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his associates. Kraus has excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what happened when the victim Brandon came to visit Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, loitering fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who comes alive in part due to the protagonist's connection to her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
