This latest work features protagonists chasing after fresh starts, trying to break free from drugs or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into aggression. The author frequently uses the phrase "new beginning", making it deliberately jaded through recurring use. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the story. Meanwhile, Kraus herself is embarking on her own fresh start, because this seems a different type of work – documentarian, truly literary. But then it turns out to be laden with the same dilemmas and approaches as her previous works.
From Chance Novelist to Iconic Work
Kraus was originally an visual artist who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting personal female narrative from self-debasement into defiance. She kept producing books, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the impact and rawness that the epistolary style infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a renegade artist who had evolved into a extensive real estate holder, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It follows that she now wants to try out new kinds of material, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a period in which she claims that Trumpian politics renders personal narrative unnecessary.
Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, spanning three generations – all unable to escape their pasts. The book includes the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, relocating from the New York borough to a pastoral setting. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a town largely deserted by liberal ideals only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in a remote part of Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader attracted to polished prose of the type the author herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the narrative style of the opening part.
As someone who reads who favors crafted language of the style that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the storytelling approach of the first section. There is a fresh level of observation that allows space for trivial aspects, like the pail that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, aided by her adored dad. "I found an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words rolling around in their mouths like hard candy". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not entirely her own."
Letdown and Fragmentation
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 audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disruption, to the unpolished style she shares with her idol author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels comes back in the middle section. Catt Greene is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid Paul control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as Paul moves between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a environment driven by the hostility and dread that drives a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her occupation changed from "author" to "real estate holder" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she states that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an America that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even see".
The Murder Narrative
Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the titular day spent by the victim with the killer and his friends. Kraus has excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when the victim Brandon came to see Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but seems affably to have spent the day with her companions, wandering about fixing his automobile and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to go further into her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through the protagonist's connection to her – another bright, bullied girl spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
