The Four Spent the Day Together features individuals chasing after new beginnings, struggling to escape drugs or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into conflict. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the story. And yet, Kraus herself is embarking on her individual reinvention, as this presents as a new kind of book – documentarian, truly literary. Yet it turns out to be filled with the same dilemmas and styles as her previous works.
From Accidental Writer to Iconic Work
Kraus started out as an visual artist who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming confessional female writing from self-debasement into assassination. She continued writing, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels missed the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a renegade artist who had evolved into a major property owner, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It makes sense that she presently aims to try out different types of content, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a period in which she states that current political era makes confessional writing redundant.
Three Generations, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning multiple eras – all unable to escape their pasts. There is the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, relocating from the New York borough to a pastoral setting. There is the narrative of the author, in the character of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. Finally the narrative of a homicide of one directionless individual by another in a town mostly forsaken by liberal ideals only 80 miles from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.
As a reader attracted to polished prose of the kind Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the narrative style of the opening part.
Being a reader drawn to honed writing of the kind that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. There is a fresh level of observation that accommodates small details, like the container that the protagonist as a child dislodges from ice at the opening of the book, helped by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a great plaything", he answers, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". She tells Emma's narrative with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this fresh tone could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the enjoyment readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disruption, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her idol author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels reasserts itself in the central part. Catt Greene is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help Paul control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a world propelled by the rage and anxiety that underpins an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her occupation changed from "novelist" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. On one occasion she states that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her social media opponents would not understand, would not even perceive".
The Killing Story
Thus we arrive to the actual killing – and the eponymous day passed by the victim with the killer and his companions. Kraus has compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day in the company of her associates, mooching around having his vehicle repaired and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.
Fascination and Incompletion
The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her personal fixations here. The standout figure is Brittney, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
