This latest work is populated with individuals pursuing fresh starts, trying to break free from substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into conflict. Kraus often employs the phrase "fresh start", rendering it willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They opted for a clean break" are scattered across the story. Meanwhile, Kraus herself seems to be making her own fresh start, as this seems a novel form of writing – documentarian, authentically narrative. However it turns out to be packed with the recurring issues and approaches as her previous works.
From Accidental Writer to Iconic Work
The writer was originally an visual artist who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating confessional female writing from abjection into rebellion. She continued writing, but the following three fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the impact and rawness that the correspondence format brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a renegade artist who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It follows that she now wants to try out fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to external narratives, at a period in which she asserts that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative unnecessary.
Multiple Generations, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering several time periods – all unable to escape their pasts. The book includes the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, representations of Kraus's parents, transitioning from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. Then there is the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her partner struggling with addiction a man named Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a town long abandoned by progressive politics only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.
As a reader fond of polished prose of the kind the author herself typically rejects, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the first section.
Being a reader who favors crafted language of the style that Kraus tends to eschew, I was won over by the novelistic voice of the initial part. There is a fresh level of observation that allows space for minutiae, like the container that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her adored dad. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a great plaything", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". She tells Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not entirely her own."
Frustration and Disruption
I was fated to feel let down when I hoped this new voice could last out the book. The author states here that she dislikes the satisfaction readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her idol author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works returns in the central part. Catt Greene is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help Paul manage his alcohol use. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a environment driven by the rage and anxiety that drives Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her occupation changed from "writer" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. On one occasion she states that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an the nation that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even perceive".
The Killing Story
Then we reach to the actual killing – and the titular day passed by the murdered individual with the murderer and his associates. Kraus has great source material, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, loitering getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by her romantic interest Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt develops an obsession by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. Yet I wished 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 – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels oddly unfinished, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
