This latest work is populated with individuals seeking fresh starts, attempting to leave behind substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into conflict. Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", rendering it deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Examples include "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the text. Meanwhile, she is embarking on her personal new beginning, because this appears a new kind of book – documentarian, authentically narrative. However it reveals itself to be packed with the familiar conflicts and styles as her previous works.
From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book
Kraus began as an artist who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming confessional female writing from abjection into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the letter form infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her role as a nonconformist creator who had evolved into a major property owner, so there was significant attention on housing investments. It makes sense that she now wants to experiment with new kinds of material, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a moment when she asserts that current political era turns intimate literature unnecessary.
Multiple Generations, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning several time periods – each trapped by their pasts. There is the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, transitioning from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a locality mostly forsaken by liberal ideals only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.
For this reader fond of polished prose of the type Kraus herself typically rejects, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.
Being a reader who favors honed writing of the kind that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was won over by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. There is a novel degree of detail that makes room for minutiae, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a nice toy", he answers, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like piece candy". She tells the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was destined to be disappointed when I hoped this different style could persist to the end. The author states here that she dislikes the pleasure those who appreciate polished prose have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she shares with her inspiration Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books comes back in the second segment. Catt is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul manage his alcohol use. She feels helpless as her spouse cycles through low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a society driven by the anger and fear that powers a political win. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "author" to "real estate holder" on a reference site. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she says that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an America that her social media opponents would not understand, would not even perceive".
The Homicide Account
Then we reach to the actual killing – and the eponymous day experienced by the deceased with the killer and his associates. Kraus has great source material, and knows hour by hour what happened when Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, loitering getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.
Obsession and Unfinished Business
The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I found myself captivated by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who gains dimension partly through Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
