The Four Spent the Day Together features protagonists chasing after new beginnings, attempting to leave behind drugs or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into conflict. The author often employs the phrase "new beginning", transforming it into willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" appear throughout the story. And yet, she seems to be making her own fresh start, because this appears a novel form of writing – documentarian, authentically narrative. However it turns out to be laden with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as her previous works.
From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book
Kraus began as an visual artist who transitioned to writing unintentionally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating confessional female writing from self-debasement into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her role as a maverick maker who had become a major property owner, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It follows that she currently desires to try out fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a period in which she asserts that contemporary political climate turns intimate literature unnecessary.
Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering several time periods – all unable to escape their pasts. There is the tale of Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, moving from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the guise of Catt Greene, grappling with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. Finally the narrative of a homicide of one directionless individual by another in a community long abandoned by progressive politics only 80 miles from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.
From my perspective as a reader fond of polished prose of the kind the author herself often avoids, I was seduced by the literary tone of the opening part.
As a reader drawn to honed writing of the kind that Kraus herself often disregards, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the initial part. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that allows space for trivial aspects, like the bucket that the young Catt dislodges from ice at the start of the story, assisted by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a great plaything", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". Kraus writes the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."
Frustration and Disruption
I was fated to feel let down when I expected this new voice could persist to the end. The author states here that she resents the pleasure readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her past books returns in the middle section. Catt Greene is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help her husband manage his alcohol use. She feels helpless as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a world driven by the anger and fear that drives an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on social media, her professional designation altered from "author" to "property owner" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she states that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her social media opponents would be unable to grasp, would not even see".
The Killing Story
So then we come to the actual killing – and the referenced day passed by the deceased with the killer and his companions. Kraus has great source material, and reconstructs step by step what occurred as Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day with her companions, wandering about fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by her romantic interest Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt develops an obsession by the story, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and reckless transgression clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman derailing in a struggling, neglected community. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
