🔗 Share this article

The Four Spent the Day Together features individuals chasing after fresh starts, struggling to escape drugs or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into conflict. Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into willfully cynical through its repetitions. Examples include "He aimed to start over" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the text. At the same time, Kraus herself is embarking on her personal new beginning, as this seems a novel form of writing – observational, genuinely novelistic. But then it proves to be packed with the recurring issues and aesthetics as her previous works.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

The writer started out as an creative who entered the literary world somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, converting confessional female writing from humiliation into assassination. She continued writing, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative 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 nonconformist creator who had evolved into a major property owner, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It is logical that she now wants to explore fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a period in which she claims that current political era makes confessional writing unnecessary.

Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning multiple eras – none able to break free from their backgrounds. The book includes the narrative about Emma and Jasper, representations of Kraus's parents, moving from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. There is the account of Kraus, in the character of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her partner struggling with addiction her husband Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a community largely deserted by liberal ideals only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.

For this reader fond of polished prose of the kind the author herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the narrative style of the first section.

Being a reader who appreciates precise prose of the variety that Kraus tends to eschew, I was seduced by the literary tone of the initial part. There is a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for trivial aspects, like the bucket that the young Catt frees from the ice at the start of the story, aided by her adored dad. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she exclaims; "a nice toy", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like hard candy". She tells the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was destined to be disappointed when I wished this new voice could continue through the novel. The author states here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disruption, to the untidy aesthetics she has in common with her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels returns in the central part. Catt Greene is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between two different states, unsuccessful in assisting Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul transitions between low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a world fueled by the anger and fear that powers Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. At one point she says that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her online critics would not understand, would overlook entirely".

The Homicide Account

Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the referenced day experienced by the victim with the perpetrator and his associates. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and details moment by moment what happened when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, loitering fixing his automobile and funding treats and narcotics, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt develops an obsession by the narrative, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who comes alive partly through Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par