The new book features protagonists pursuing fresh starts, attempting to leave behind drugs or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into violence. The author often employs the phrase "new beginning", rendering it deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the text. And yet, she appears to be undertaking her own fresh start, because this appears a different type of work – fact-based, truly literary. But then it proves to be laden with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as earlier books.
From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work
The writer started out as an visual artist who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating confessional female writing from humiliation into assassination. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels did not possess the power and directness that the correspondence format infused into the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a renegade artist who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It follows that she currently desires to explore fresh narrative sources, directing her gaze to other people's stories, at a period in which she claims that Trumpian politics renders personal narrative obsolete.
Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing multiple eras – all unable to escape their pasts. There is the tale of Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, moving from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. There is the narrative of the author, in the character of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success 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 troubled youth by another in a community long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader drawn to refined literature of the kind the author herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.
Being a reader who appreciates precise prose of the variety that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. It possesses a novel degree of detail that makes room for small details, like the bucket that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the opening of the book, aided by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". The author narrates the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not entirely her own."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was fated to feel let down when I wished this different style could continue through the novel. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the pleasure readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works returns in the central part. The protagonist is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between Minnesota and LA, unable to aid her husband manage his alcohol use. She experiences powerlessness as Paul transitions between poorly supported positions as an recovery specialist in a environment propelled by the rage and anxiety that underpins an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "author" to "real estate holder" on a reference site. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she remarks 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
Thus we arrive to the actual killing – and the titular day spent by the victim with the killer and his friends. The author possesses excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what transpired when Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, loitering having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has repeatedly received inpatient care for aggressive outbursts.
Obsession and Unfinished Business
The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partially because of Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that Catt converses 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
