This latest work features characters pursuing new beginnings, struggling to escape addictions or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into conflict. Kraus frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", making it deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" appear throughout the narrative. At the same time, Kraus herself is embarking on her individual reinvention, because this appears a novel form of writing – fact-based, truly literary. Yet it reveals itself to be laden with the recurring issues and styles as past novels.
From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic
The writer started out as an visual artist who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, transforming personal female narrative from abjection into defiance. She continued writing, but the following three compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the letter form imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her role as a renegade artist who had become a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It is logical that she presently aims to explore fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a period in which she states that current political era turns intimate literature unnecessary.
Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering multiple eras – all unable to escape their histories. The book includes the tale of Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, transitioning from the urban environment to a pastoral setting. Additionally the account of Kraus, in the guise of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband a man named Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a locality long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.
As a reader drawn to polished prose of the sort Kraus typically rejects, I was seduced by the literary tone of the first section.
As a reader who favors honed writing of the kind that the author often disregards, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the first section. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for minutiae, like the pail that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like hard candy". She tells Emma's narrative with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."
Frustration and Disruption
I was fated to feel let down when I wished this fresh tone could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the pleasure audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her hero Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her past books reasserts itself in the second segment. Catt is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help Paul control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as her spouse cycles through low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a society fueled by the anger and fear that drives a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her occupation changed from "writer" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. At one point she says that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she could potentially understand something about an America that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even perceive".
The Homicide Account
So then we come to the murder itself – and the titular day passed by the deceased with the murderer and his companions. Kraus has compelling foundational content, and knows hour by hour what happened when Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He sought a sexual encounter but seems affably to have spent the day with her companions, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by her romantic interest Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards responsible documentation and reckless transgression clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to go further into her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who gains dimension partly through the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the extent that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
