The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with individuals chasing after fresh starts, attempting to leave behind drugs or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. Kraus frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", making it intentionally weary through recurring use. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They opted for a clean break" recur in the narrative. And yet, she seems to be making her individual reinvention, as this seems a new kind of book – documentarian, authentically narrative. However it turns out to be laden with the recurring issues and styles as past novels.
From Chance Novelist to Iconic Work
Kraus began as an creative who transitioned to writing unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting personal female narrative from self-debasement into rebellion. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels lacked the power and directness that the correspondence format imparted to the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a maverick maker who had evolved into a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It makes sense that she presently aims to explore new kinds of material, turning outward to the experiences of others, at a period in which she asserts that current political era makes confessional writing unnecessary.
Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, encompassing multiple eras – all unable to escape their histories. There is the story of Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, transitioning from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a town largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in rural Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader drawn to polished prose of the type the author herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the literary tone of the opening part.
As someone who reads drawn to precise prose of the style that the author usually avoids, I was seduced by the literary tone of the initial part. There is a novel degree of detail that accommodates trivial aspects, like the container that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the opening of the book, aided by her adored dad. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". The author narrates Emma's story with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not entirely her own."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this new voice could persist to the end. The author states here that she resents the enjoyment readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she has in common with her hero author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books returns in the second segment. The protagonist is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid Paul curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as her spouse cycles through underfunded jobs as an substance abuse counselor in a world propelled by the anger and fear that underpins a political win. A significant portion discusses about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her occupation changed from "author" to "real estate holder" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. At one point she remarks that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her social media opponents would not understand, would not even see".
The Killing Story
Then we reach to the murder itself – and the titular day experienced by the victim with the murderer and his companions. Kraus has great source material, and knows hour by hour what occurred as Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, mooching around having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.
Fascination and Incompletion
The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the point that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
