This latest work centers on individuals seeking new beginnings, struggling to escape addictions or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into violence. The author often employs the phrase "new beginning", transforming it into willfully cynical through recurring use. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the text. At the same time, Kraus herself is embarking on her own fresh start, because this seems a new kind of book – fact-based, authentically narrative. However it turns out to be laden with the same dilemmas and approaches as past novels.
From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic
Kraus began as an creative who transitioned to writing unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting confessional female writing from abjection into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the following three compelling and abrasive novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format brought to the voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her role as a renegade artist who had evolved into a major property owner, so there was much discussion on real estate deals. It is logical that she now wants to try out fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a time when she states that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing redundant.
Several Eras, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning several time periods – each trapped by their pasts. There is the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, relocating from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the guise of protagonist Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband her husband Paul. Finally the narrative of a homicide of one directionless individual by another in a locality long abandoned by liberal ideals only a short distance from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.
From my perspective as a reader attracted to polished prose of the kind the author herself often avoids, I was seduced by the literary tone of the first section.
As a reader drawn to precise prose of the variety that the author tends to eschew, I was won over by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. There is a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for minutiae, like the container that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the start of the story, assisted by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a nice toy", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". Kraus writes Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."
Frustration and Disruption
I was fated to feel let down when I wished this fresh tone could last out the book. The author states here that she is annoyed by the pleasure readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her earlier works returns in the second segment. The protagonist is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as Paul moves between poorly supported positions as an recovery specialist in a society propelled by the hostility and dread that drives Trump's victory. A significant portion discusses about Catt being cancelled on social media, her occupation changed from "author" to "landlord" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. On one occasion she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her social media opponents would not understand, would not even perceive".
The Murder Narrative
Thus we arrive to the homicide in question – and the referenced day spent by the victim with the killer and his friends. The author possesses excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after connecting via an application where she sold sex pictures. He sought a sexual encounter but seems affably to have spent the day in the company of her associates, wandering about fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.
Obsession and Unfinished Business
Catt develops an obsession by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards ethical reporting and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her own obsessions here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who gains dimension partially because of Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels oddly unfinished, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
