The Four Spent the Day Together centers on characters pursuing new beginnings, struggling to escape drugs or toxic relationships, only to see hope turn into violence. The author often employs the phrase "clean slate", rendering it willfully cynical through recurring use. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They opted for a clean break" are scattered across the text. Meanwhile, Kraus herself seems to be making her own fresh start, because this seems a different type of work – observational, genuinely novelistic. However it turns out to be laden with the familiar conflicts and styles as past novels.
From Accidental Writer to Iconic Work
The writer began as an artist who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating intimate women's literature from humiliation into defiance. She kept producing books, but the following three fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the power and directness that the letter form brought to the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a renegade artist who had turned into a extensive real estate holder, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It follows that she now wants to try out new kinds of material, turning outward to the experiences of others, at a period in which she states that current political era makes confessional writing redundant.
Three Generations, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning multiple eras – all unable to escape their backgrounds. The book includes the tale of Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, transitioning from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. Additionally the account of Kraus, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband a man named Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a locality long abandoned by liberal ideals only a short distance from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader drawn to refined literature of the sort Kraus typically rejects, I was seduced by the narrative style of the opening part.
Being a reader who appreciates honed writing of the kind that the author tends to eschew, I was won over by the novelistic voice of the first section. There is a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for small details, like the pail that the protagonist as a child dislodges from ice at the opening of the book, aided by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a nice toy", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like hard candy". She tells the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."
Frustration and Disruption
I was destined to be disappointed when I hoped this different style could continue through the novel. Kraus says here that she dislikes the enjoyment those who appreciate polished prose have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her past books returns in the middle section. Catt Greene is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid her husband manage his alcohol use. She is overwhelmed as her spouse cycles through low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a society fueled by the hostility and dread that powers Trump's victory. A significant portion discusses about Catt being cancelled on social media, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. At one point she says that she's investigating the murder so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her social media opponents would not understand, would not even perceive".
The Homicide Account
Thus we arrive to the actual killing – and the eponymous day passed by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his friends. Kraus utilizes excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day in the company of her associates, loitering getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by her romantic interest Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for aggressive outbursts.
Obsession and Unfinished Business
The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who comes alive partly through Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
