This latest work features characters seeking new beginnings, struggling to escape drugs or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into violence. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into deliberately jaded through recurring use. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They opted for a clean break" are scattered across the story. At the same time, Kraus herself is embarking on her personal new beginning, since this seems a novel form of writing – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. But then it reveals itself to be laden with the recurring issues and aesthetics as past novels.
From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic
Kraus started out as an artist who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, converting personal female narrative from humiliation into assassination. She continued writing, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels missed the impact and rawness that the correspondence format brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a maverick maker who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It is logical that she currently desires to try out fresh narrative sources, directing her gaze to other people's stories, at a time when she asserts that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature redundant.
Multiple Generations, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, encompassing three generations – each trapped by their pasts. There is the tale of Emma and Jasper, representations of Kraus's parents, moving from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the character of Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one directionless individual by another in a community long abandoned by progressive politics only a short distance from the protagonist's home in rural Minnesota.
For this reader fond of refined literature of the sort the author herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the opening part.
Being a reader drawn to honed writing of the style that Kraus usually avoids, I was won over by the literary tone of the initial part. It exhibits a fresh level of observation that allows space for minutiae, like the container that the young Catt frees from the ice at the opening of the book, helped by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a nice toy", he answers, "the nuanced interpretations of terms tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". She tells the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not entirely her own."
Frustration and Disruption
I was fated to feel let down when I hoped this new voice could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the pleasure those who appreciate polished prose have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to disruption, to the unpolished style she has in common with her hero Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works comes back in the second segment. Catt is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while moving between two different states, failing to help her husband curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul moves between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a world fueled by the anger and fear that drives a political win. A significant portion discusses about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her listed profession modified from "writer" to "landlord" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she states that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even perceive".
The Killing Story
Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the referenced day experienced by the deceased with the killer and his friends. Kraus has great source material, and reconstructs step by step what occurred as Brandon came to meet Brittney after connecting via an application where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, loitering having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.
Obsession and Unfinished Business
Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman spiraling out of control in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
