This latest work centers on characters chasing after new beginnings, struggling to escape substance abuse or toxic relationships, only to witness hope devolve into violence. Kraus often employs the phrase "new beginning", rendering it deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They opted for a clean break" are scattered across the narrative. And yet, she appears to be undertaking her own fresh start, as this seems a different type of work – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. However it proves to be packed with the recurring issues and styles as her previous works.
From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic
Kraus was originally an creative who entered the literary world somewhat by chance with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, elevating intimate women's literature from humiliation into assassination. She kept producing books, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels missed the power and directness that the correspondence format brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a maverick maker who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It makes sense that she currently desires to explore different types of content, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a period in which she asserts that contemporary political climate turns intimate literature unnecessary.
Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning several time periods – each trapped by their pasts. There is the tale of characters Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, moving from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one directionless individual by another in a town long abandoned by progressive politics only a short distance from the protagonist's home in rural Minnesota.
For this reader drawn to polished prose of the kind Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the opening part.
Being a reader who appreciates honed writing of the kind that the author tends to eschew, I was won over by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. There is a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for trivial aspects, like the container that the young Catt dislodges from ice at the opening of the book, aided by her adored dad. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like hard candy". Kraus writes Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not entirely her own."
Frustration and Disruption
I was fated to feel let down when I expected this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she resents the pleasure readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disruption, to the unpolished style she echoes from her hero author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels comes back in the second segment. Catt is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help her husband manage his alcohol use. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between underfunded jobs as an substance abuse counselor in a environment driven by the hostility and dread that drives an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her listed profession modified from "writer" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she states that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even see".
The Murder Narrative
So then we come to the murder itself – and the eponymous day experienced by the murdered individual with the murderer and his associates. Kraus has great source material, and details moment by moment what transpired when the victim Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, mooching around getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being shot by her romantic interest Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt develops an obsession by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to go further into her personal fixations here. The standout figure is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the point that her narrative ends almost mid-par
