This latest work features characters chasing after fresh starts, attempting to leave behind drugs or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into conflict. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", rendering it intentionally weary through its repetitions. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" appear throughout the story. Meanwhile, she appears to be undertaking her own fresh start, as this seems a different type of work – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. Yet it proves to be laden with the recurring issues and styles as earlier books.
From Chance Novelist to Iconic Work
Kraus began as an visual artist who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, converting confessional female writing from humiliation into assassination. She continued writing, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels missed the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style brought to the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a renegade artist who had turned into a major property owner, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It follows that she now wants to try out fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a period in which she claims that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing redundant.
Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning multiple eras – each trapped by their pasts. There is the story of characters Emma and Jasper, representations of Kraus's parents, moving from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one directionless individual by another in a locality long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.
As a reader fond of polished prose of the sort the author herself typically rejects, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the opening part.
As someone who reads drawn to precise prose of the variety that Kraus herself often disregards, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. It possesses a novel degree of detail that accommodates small details, like the pail that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the opening of the book, assisted by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a nice toy", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". She tells Emma's narrative with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."
Frustration and Disruption
I was destined to be disappointed when I hoped this new voice could continue through the novel. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the satisfaction those who appreciate polished prose have gotten from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she shares with her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works returns in the second segment. Catt Greene is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between Minnesota and LA, unable to aid Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a world fueled by the rage and anxiety that drives Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on social media, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she remarks that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an the nation that her social media opponents would not understand, would not even see".
The Killing Story
Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day spent by the deceased with the killer and his friends. The author possesses great source material, and details moment by moment what occurred as a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after connecting via an application where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, loitering having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.
Fascination and Incompletion
The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partially because of Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par
