The new book features individuals pursuing new beginnings, struggling to escape addictions or harmful partnerships, only to see hope turn into conflict. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", making it willfully cynical through recurring use. Examples include "He aimed to start over" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the text. At the same time, she is embarking on her individual reinvention, as this appears a novel form of writing – fact-based, truly literary. But then it proves to be laden with the familiar conflicts and styles as past novels.
From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic
The writer was originally an visual artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, converting personal female narrative from abjection into defiance. She continued writing, but the following three compelling and abrasive 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 renegade artist who had turned into a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It makes sense that she currently desires to try out new kinds of material, turning outward to external narratives, at a period in which she states that current political era makes confessional writing redundant.
Multiple Generations, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering multiple eras – each trapped by their pasts. The book includes the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, representations of Kraus's parents, transitioning from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the persona of Catt Greene, confronting the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction her husband Paul. The third thread involves the story of the murder of one troubled youth by another in a community mostly forsaken by liberal ideals only 80 miles from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.
From my perspective as a reader attracted to polished prose of the kind Kraus herself often avoids, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the opening part.
As someone who reads who favors honed writing of the variety that the author often disregards, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the initial part. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that makes room for trivial aspects, like the container that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the opening of the book, helped by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a great plaything", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". She tells Emma's narrative with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."
Frustration and Disruption
I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this different style could last out the book. Kraus says here that she dislikes the satisfaction readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she has in common with her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels returns in the central part. The protagonist is working on refurbishing three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a society driven by the hostility and dread that underpins Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her professional designation altered from "author" to "real estate holder" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she states that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn something about an the nation that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".
The Homicide Account
Then we reach to the murder itself – and the referenced day spent by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his associates. The author possesses great source material, and knows hour by hour what occurred as the victim Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, mooching around getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and reckless transgression tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to go further into her personal fixations here. The standout figure is Brittney herself, who comes alive partially because of Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she fails to enact these dialogues. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
