The Four Spent the Day Together centers on individuals pursuing new beginnings, attempting to leave behind drugs or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into conflict. Kraus often employs the phrase "new beginning", transforming it into intentionally weary through its repetitions. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the narrative. And yet, she seems to be making her individual reinvention, since this seems a novel form of writing – documentarian, truly literary. However it proves to be packed with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as past novels.
From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic
Kraus started out as an artist who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as missives to a distant beloved, elevating personal female narrative from self-debasement into rebellion. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style infused into the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a nonconformist creator who had become a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It is logical that she now wants to explore new kinds of material, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a period in which she asserts that current political era makes confessional writing redundant.
Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering multiple eras – all unable to escape their pasts. We encounter the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, transitioning from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. There is the narrative of the author, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a community largely deserted by liberal ideals only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader drawn to refined literature of the kind the author herself tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the opening part.
As someone who reads drawn to honed writing of the style that Kraus usually avoids, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the first section. There is a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for trivial aspects, like the pail that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, aided by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like sweet treats". She tells Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."
Frustration and Disruption
I was fated to feel let down when I wished this new voice could last out the book. The author states here that she resents the satisfaction readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disruption, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her hero Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels comes back in the middle section. Catt Greene 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 manage his alcohol use. She experiences powerlessness as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a society driven by the hostility and dread that drives an electoral success. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "author" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. At one point she remarks that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would be unable to grasp, would not even see".
The Homicide Account
Thus we arrive to the actual killing – and the eponymous day passed by the murdered individual with the killer and his friends. The author possesses great source material, and reconstructs step by step what occurred as Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, loitering having his vehicle repaired and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by Brittney's partner Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who gains dimension in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she fails to enact these dialogues. This entire part feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
