The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with characters seeking new beginnings, attempting to leave behind addictions or harmful partnerships, only to see hope turn into conflict. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", making it intentionally weary through recurring use. Examples include "He aimed to start over" and "They chose to begin anew" appear throughout the story. And yet, the author herself is embarking on her individual reinvention, as this seems a different type of work – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. Yet it proves to be laden with the familiar conflicts and approaches as earlier books.
From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic
Kraus started out as an artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting intimate women's literature from humiliation into assassination. She continued writing, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels missed the power and directness that the epistolary style infused into the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a maverick maker who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was significant attention on housing investments. It is logical that she presently aims to experiment with fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to external narratives, at a time when 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, encompassing multiple eras – all unable to escape their pasts. The book includes the narrative about Emma and Jasper, versions of Kraus's parents, relocating from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. Additionally the account of Kraus, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth 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.
For this reader attracted to polished prose of the kind the author herself typically rejects, I was seduced by the narrative style of the first section.
Being a reader drawn to crafted language of the kind that Kraus often disregards, I was captivated by the literary tone of the opening segment. It possesses a novel degree of detail that allows space for minutiae, like the container that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the opening of the book, assisted by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a nice toy", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". She tells the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was fated to feel let down when I wished this different style could continue through the novel. Kraus says here that she dislikes the pleasure those who appreciate polished prose have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to disruption, to the unpolished style she shares with her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works reasserts itself in the middle section. The protagonist is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between two different states, failing to help her husband curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as Paul transitions between low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a world fueled by the hostility and dread that powers an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "landlord" on the online encyclopedia. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she states that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she might be able to learn something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would fail to comprehend, would not even see".
The Killing Story
Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the referenced day spent by the deceased with the perpetrator and his friends. Kraus has great source material, and details moment by moment what happened when Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day with her companions, loitering having his vehicle repaired and covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation 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 in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the point that her narrative ends almost mid-par
