The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with individuals seeking fresh starts, struggling to escape addictions or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into violence. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", making it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the narrative. And yet, the author herself seems to be making her own fresh start, because this appears a new kind of book – fact-based, truly literary. Yet it reveals itself to be filled with the familiar conflicts and styles as past novels.
From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book
The writer started out as an visual artist who transitioned to writing unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting personal female narrative from self-debasement into defiance. She kept producing books, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels missed the shock and immediacy that the letter form infused into the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a nonconformist creator who had evolved into a extensive real estate holder, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It makes sense that she presently aims to experiment with different types of content, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a moment when she claims that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature obsolete.
Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning three generations – none able to break free from their backgrounds. We encounter the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, moving from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. There is the account of Kraus, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. The third thread involves the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a community long abandoned by liberal ideals only 80 miles from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.
As a reader fond of polished prose of the type Kraus often avoids, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the initial segment.
Being a reader who appreciates precise prose of the style that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was won over by the literary tone of the initial part. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that makes room for small details, like the pail that the young Catt dislodges from ice at the start of the story, aided by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like sweet treats". Kraus writes Emma's story with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this fresh tone could last out the book. The author states here that she resents the pleasure audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the unpolished style she has in common with her idol author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels reasserts itself in the central part. Catt is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid her husband control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a society propelled by the hostility and dread that underpins a political win. A significant portion discusses about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her listed profession modified from "author" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she remarks that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she could potentially understand something about an the nation that her social media opponents would fail to comprehend, would not even perceive".
The Murder Narrative
Thus we arrive to the homicide in question – and the referenced day passed by the victim with the killer and his friends. Kraus utilizes excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what occurred as the victim Brandon came to visit Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, wandering about getting his car mended and funding treats and narcotics, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.
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 reckless transgression tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who gains dimension partially because of the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
