This latest work is populated with individuals seeking fresh starts, attempting to leave behind addictions or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into conflict. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", making it intentionally weary through constant reiteration. Phrases such as "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" recur in the text. At the same time, she appears to be undertaking her individual reinvention, because this presents as a different type of work – fact-based, authentically narrative. However it reveals itself to be laden with the familiar conflicts and styles as past novels.
From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic
Kraus started out as an visual artist who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as missives to a distant beloved, converting confessional female writing from humiliation into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the power and directness that the epistolary style brought to the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a nonconformist creator who had evolved into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It is logical that she now wants to experiment with new kinds of material, turning outward to the experiences of others, at a period in which she asserts that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing obsolete.
Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering three generations – all unable to escape their backgrounds. The book includes the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, relocating from the New York borough to a pastoral setting. Then there is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a locality largely deserted by progressive politics only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.
For this reader attracted to honed writing 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 honed writing of the variety that the author usually avoids, I was won over by the novelistic voice of the initial part. It exhibits a fresh level of observation that makes room for trivial aspects, like the bucket that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a great plaything", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like hard candy". Kraus writes Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this fresh tone could persist to the end. The author states here that she dislikes the satisfaction those who appreciate polished prose have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the unpolished style she shares with her idol author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels reasserts itself in the second segment. The protagonist is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between two different states, unable to aid her husband curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as her spouse cycles through underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a world fueled by the anger and fear that powers Trump's victory. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her listed profession modified from "author" to "real estate holder" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. At one point she says that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would not even see".
The Killing Story
Then we reach to the actual killing – and the eponymous day passed by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his friends. Kraus utilizes great source material, and details moment by moment what happened when the victim Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day in the company of her associates, loitering getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.
Fascination and Incompletion
The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her personal fixations here. The standout figure is Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through the protagonist's connection to 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 doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par
