The new book is populated with characters chasing after clean slates, attempting to leave behind substance abuse or harmful partnerships, only to witness hope devolve into conflict. Kraus often employs the phrase "fresh start", rendering it willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Phrases such as "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They opted for a clean break" are scattered across the story. At the same time, the author herself seems to be making her personal new beginning, because this appears a novel form of writing – observational, authentically narrative. However it proves to be laden with the same dilemmas and styles as earlier books.
From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book
Kraus started out as an visual artist who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, transforming intimate women's literature from abjection into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels lacked the power and directness that the epistolary style brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a nonconformist creator who had become a major property owner, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It makes sense that she currently desires to try out new kinds of material, turning outward to other people's stories, at a moment when she claims that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing unnecessary.
Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing three generations – all unable to escape their pasts. The book includes the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, versions of the author's parents, relocating from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a locality mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies 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 sort Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the literary tone of the first section.
Being a reader who favors honed writing of the kind that Kraus often disregards, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the initial part. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for trivial aspects, like the container that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the start of the story, helped by her adored dad. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this fresh tone could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she resents the pleasure readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she shares with her hero Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels reasserts itself in the middle section. Catt is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a society driven by the rage and anxiety that powers an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on social media, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "property owner" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she remarks that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn something about an the United States that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would overlook entirely".
The Murder Narrative
Then we reach to the murder itself – and the titular day experienced by the deceased with the killer and his associates. Kraus has compelling foundational content, and details moment by moment what transpired when the victim Brandon came to see Brittney after connecting via an application where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to go further into her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who comes alive in part due to Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
