The Four Spent the Day Together features protagonists pursuing new beginnings, struggling to escape addictions or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into violence. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", rendering it willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the story. And yet, the author herself appears to be undertaking her personal new beginning, as this seems a novel form of writing – observational, truly literary. But then it turns out to be packed with the recurring issues and styles as her previous works.
From Chance Novelist to Iconic Work
The writer was originally an artist who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, transforming confessional female writing from abjection into assassination. She continued writing, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels lacked the impact and rawness that the epistolary style imparted to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a nonconformist creator who had evolved into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It is logical that she currently desires to try out new kinds of material, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a period in which she states that current political era turns intimate literature unnecessary.
Three Generations, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, spanning multiple eras – none able to break free from their pasts. There is the story of Emma and Jasper, versions of Kraus's parents, relocating from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a town largely deserted by progressive politics only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader drawn to honed writing of the type the author herself typically rejects, I was captivated by the narrative style of the opening part.
As someone who reads drawn to honed writing of the style that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that allows space for small details, like the pail that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". Kraus writes the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not entirely her own."
Frustration and Disruption
I was destined to be disappointed when I wished this different style could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the pleasure audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her past books returns in the central part. The protagonist is trying to renovate 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 is overwhelmed as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a society propelled by the hostility and dread that powers a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "real estate holder" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. At one point she remarks that she's investigating the murder so that before departing the state, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her online critics would not understand, would not even perceive".
The Murder Narrative
Thus we arrive to the actual killing – and the eponymous day experienced by the murdered individual with the killer and his associates. The author possesses great source material, and knows hour by hour what transpired when the victim Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He sought a sexual encounter but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, wandering about getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.
Fascination and Incompletion
The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to explore more thoroughly her individual preoccupations here. The standout figure is Brittney, who gains dimension partly through Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the point that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
