🔗 Share this article

The Four Spent the Day Together centers on individuals chasing after fresh starts, trying to break free from addictions or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into conflict. The author often employs the phrase "fresh start", making it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" recur in the text. Meanwhile, Kraus herself is embarking on her personal new beginning, because this presents as a new kind of book – fact-based, authentically narrative. But then it turns out to be packed with the recurring issues and aesthetics as past novels.

From Accidental Writer to Iconic Work

The writer started out as an creative who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating intimate women's literature from abjection into defiance. She continued writing, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels lacked the power and directness that the epistolary style infused into the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a renegade artist who had evolved into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It follows that she now wants to experiment with fresh narrative sources, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a moment when 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, spanning three generations – none able to break free from their histories. There is the tale of characters Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, moving from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. There is the account of Kraus, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the late recognition of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one troubled youth by another in a community mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.

For this reader drawn to honed writing of the kind the author herself often avoids, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the opening part.

As a reader who favors honed writing of the kind that the author tends to eschew, I was won over by the literary tone of the first section. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for trivial aspects, like the bucket that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the opening of the book, helped by her cherished parent. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a great plaything", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language rolling around in their mouths like hard candy". She tells the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this fresh tone could last out the book. The author states here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels reasserts itself in the middle section. The protagonist is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between Minnesota and LA, unsuccessful in assisting Paul control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as her spouse cycles through low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a society propelled by the anger and fear that drives an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her listed profession modified from "author" to "landlord" on a reference site. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. On one occasion she says that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an America that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".

The Homicide Account

So then we come to the actual killing – and the titular day experienced by the victim with the killer and his associates. The author possesses excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what happened when Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she offered adult photos. He sought a sexual encounter but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, mooching around fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by her romantic interest Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who gains dimension partially because of the protagonist's connection to her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par