This latest work centers on characters seeking fresh starts, struggling to escape drugs or harmful partnerships, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", transforming it into intentionally weary through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the text. At the same time, she appears to be undertaking her individual reinvention, as this presents as a novel form of writing – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. But then it reveals itself to be packed with the familiar conflicts and styles as past novels.
From Chance Novelist to Iconic Work
The writer was originally an artist who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming personal female narrative from humiliation into defiance. She kept producing books, but the following three compelling and abrasive novels missed the impact and rawness that the letter form imparted to the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a maverick maker who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It makes sense that she currently desires to experiment with new kinds of material, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a time when she states that current political era makes confessional writing unnecessary.
Three Generations, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, spanning three generations – none able to break free from their histories. We encounter the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, moving from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. There is the narrative of the author, in the guise of Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. The third thread involves the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a town largely deserted by liberal ideals only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in a remote part of Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader fond of polished prose of the kind Kraus herself often avoids, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the first section.
As a reader who appreciates honed writing of the variety that Kraus tends to eschew, I was won over by the literary tone of the first section. It possesses a novel degree of detail that accommodates minutiae, like the container that the young Catt frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a lovely toy", he answers, "the nuanced interpretations of terms rolling around in their mouths like sweet treats". She tells the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."
Frustration and Disruption
I was fated to feel let down when I expected this different style could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment those who appreciate polished prose have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books returns in the middle section. The protagonist is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while moving between two different states, unable to aid Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as her spouse transitions between poorly supported positions as an substance abuse counselor in a society driven by the hostility and dread that powers Trump's victory. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on a platform, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "landlord" on the online encyclopedia. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she remarks that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she could potentially understand something about an America that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".
The Murder Narrative
So then we come to the actual killing – and the referenced day passed by the deceased with the perpetrator and his friends. Kraus has compelling foundational content, and knows hour by hour what transpired when the victim Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He sought a sexual encounter but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, mooching around fixing his automobile and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that Catt speaks to Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
