The Four Spent the Day Together features protagonists seeking new beginnings, struggling to escape drugs or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into violence. Kraus often employs the phrase "fresh start", making it deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the story. At the same time, she is embarking on her own fresh start, since this presents as a novel form of writing – fact-based, truly literary. But then it reveals itself to be laden with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as past novels.
From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work
The writer was originally an artist who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, converting personal female narrative from abjection into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the power and directness that the epistolary style brought to the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a maverick maker who had evolved into a extensive real estate holder, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It follows that she now wants to experiment with new kinds of material, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a period in which she claims that contemporary political climate turns intimate literature unnecessary.
Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning multiple eras – all unable to escape their backgrounds. The book includes the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, versions of Kraus's parents, transitioning from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a town mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in a remote part of Minnesota.
As a reader drawn to honed writing of the kind Kraus often avoids, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the first section.
As someone who reads who favors honed writing of the kind that Kraus usually avoids, I was captivated by the storytelling approach of the initial part. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for small details, like the pail that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, helped by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a nice toy", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". The author narrates Emma's narrative with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this fresh tone could continue through the novel. The author states here that she resents the enjoyment readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her past books reasserts itself in the second segment. The protagonist is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between two different states, failing to help her husband control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as Paul transitions between poorly supported positions as an addiction therapist in a world driven by the hostility and dread that powers an electoral success. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. At one point she remarks that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her social media opponents would fail to comprehend, would not even see".
The Murder Narrative
So then we come to the actual killing – and the eponymous day experienced by the deceased with the murderer and his friends. The author possesses excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what occurred as Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, mooching around fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by her romantic interest Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I found myself captivated by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
