The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with characters chasing after new beginnings, attempting to leave behind addictions or harmful partnerships, only to see hope turn into violence. The author often employs the phrase "clean slate", making it willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Phrases such as "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the story. Meanwhile, the author herself seems to be making her personal new beginning, because this seems a novel form of writing – observational, genuinely novelistic. But then it reveals itself to be packed with the recurring issues and approaches as her previous works.
From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic
The writer started out as an artist who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, converting intimate women's literature from abjection into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style infused into the voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her role as a maverick maker who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It makes sense that she now wants to explore different types of content, turning outward to other people's stories, at a time when she states that current political era turns intimate literature obsolete.
Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering multiple eras – none able to break free from their pasts. The book includes the narrative about Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, transitioning from the New York borough to a pastoral setting. Additionally the narrative of the author, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her partner struggling with addiction a man named Paul. Finally the story of the murder of one directionless individual by another in a town long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in a remote part of Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader attracted to honed writing of the kind Kraus tends to eschew, I was seduced by the narrative style of the first section.
Being a reader who appreciates crafted language of the kind that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the initial part. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates small details, like the bucket that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, assisted by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". She tells the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."
Frustration and Disruption
I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this fresh tone could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the satisfaction readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to disruption, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her past books reasserts itself in the middle section. Catt is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between Minnesota and LA, unsuccessful in assisting Paul control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as her spouse cycles through underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a society fueled by the hostility and dread that powers Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on a platform, her professional designation altered from "author" to "real estate holder" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she remarks that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she could potentially understand something about an the nation that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even see".
The Murder Narrative
Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the titular day experienced by the victim with the perpetrator and his companions. Kraus has compelling foundational content, and details moment by moment what transpired when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, mooching around having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being shot by her romantic interest Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards responsible documentation and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to go further into her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who comes alive in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The complete segment feels oddly unfinished, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
