🔗 Share this article

The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with protagonists seeking clean slates, trying to break free from drugs or harmful partnerships, only to see hope turn into conflict. Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into willfully cynical through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the narrative. Meanwhile, she appears to be undertaking her personal new beginning, because this appears a different type of work – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. Yet it reveals itself to be packed with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as past novels.

From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work

Kraus began as an creative who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, elevating confessional female writing from abjection into defiance. She kept producing books, but the following three fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the letter form infused into the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a renegade artist who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It is logical that she now wants to explore fresh narrative sources, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a period in which she states that current political era turns intimate literature redundant.

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. We encounter the story of characters Emma and Jasper, versions of the author's parents, transitioning from the Bronx to a pastoral setting. Additionally the narrative of the author, in the guise of Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a locality long abandoned by liberal ideals only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.

As a reader drawn to polished prose of the sort the author herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the literary tone of the initial segment.

As a reader who favors crafted language of the variety that Kraus often disregards, I was won over by the literary tone of the opening segment. It exhibits a fresh level of observation that makes room for minutiae, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like sweet treats". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."

Frustration and Disruption

I was fated to feel let down when I wished this different style could continue through the novel. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the unpolished style she echoes from her hero Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels returns in the second segment. The protagonist is attempting to do up multiple decrepit residences in the city's most challenging districts while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting her husband control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as Paul cycles through poorly supported positions as an recovery specialist in a society driven by the anger and fear that drives an electoral success. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "real estate holder" on a reference site. She still gives the impression to care a little too much 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 the nation that her Twitter detractors would be unable to grasp, would not even see".

The Homicide Account

So then we come to the murder itself – and the referenced day passed by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his friends. Kraus has great source material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when Brandon came to meet Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He sought a sexual encounter but seems affably to have spent the day with her companions, mooching around getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for aggressive outbursts.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

Catt develops an obsession by the story, and I found myself captivated by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The compelling persona 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 difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par