The new book is populated with individuals seeking fresh starts, trying to break free from addictions or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", rendering it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the story. At the same time, Kraus herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, because this seems a novel form of writing – observational, truly literary. Yet it turns out to be filled with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as her previous works.
From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic
The writer started out as an artist who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating confessional female writing from humiliation into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels lacked the impact and rawness that the epistolary style brought to the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a maverick maker who had evolved into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It is logical that she currently desires to try out different types of content, turning outward to external narratives, at a period in which she claims that contemporary political climate turns intimate literature redundant.
Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering three generations – each trapped by their pasts. There is the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, transitioning from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of Catt Greene, grappling with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a community mostly forsaken by progressive politics only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.
For this reader drawn to polished prose of the type the author herself tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the first section.
As someone who reads drawn to honed writing of the kind that Kraus usually avoids, I was captivated by the literary tone of the initial part. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for minutiae, like the container that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the opening of the book, helped by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a nice toy", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". Kraus writes the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not entirely her own."
Frustration and Disruption
I was destined to be disappointed when I hoped this different style could persist to the end. The author states here that she dislikes the pleasure audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to disruption, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her idol author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels comes back in the middle section. Catt is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul moves between poorly supported positions as an addiction therapist in a world fueled by the hostility and dread that powers an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she says that she's looking into the killing so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an America that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would overlook entirely".
The Murder Narrative
Thus we arrive to the homicide in question – and the titular day spent by the deceased with the murderer and his companions. Kraus utilizes compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what happened when Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day in the company of her associates, mooching around having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.
Fascination and Incompletion
The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who comes alive in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that Catt speaks to Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the extent that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
