The Four Spent the Day Together centers on individuals chasing after clean slates, struggling to escape substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into violence. The author frequently uses the phrase "new beginning", rendering it intentionally weary through its repetitions. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the story. And yet, she is embarking on her personal new beginning, because this seems a different type of work – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. Yet it reveals itself to be laden with the same dilemmas and styles as earlier books.
From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic
Kraus was originally an artist who transitioned to writing unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating personal female narrative from abjection into rebellion. She continued writing, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels lacked the impact and rawness that the epistolary style brought to the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a nonconformist creator who had become a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It follows that she now wants to experiment with different types of content, turning outward to the experiences of others, at a period in which she asserts that current political era renders personal narrative obsolete.
Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning several time periods – none able to break free from their backgrounds. There is the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, representations of Kraus's parents, moving from the New York borough to a pastoral setting. Additionally the narrative of the author, in the guise of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one directionless individual by another in a community mostly forsaken by progressive politics only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in a remote part of Minnesota.
For this reader drawn to refined literature of the type the author herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the narrative style of the first section.
As someone who reads who favors precise prose of the kind that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that makes room for small details, like the container that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the start of the story, helped by her cherished parent. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a great plaything", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". She tells Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."
Frustration and Disruption
I was fated to feel let down when I hoped this different style could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the satisfaction audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her idol Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works reasserts itself in the second segment. Catt is working on refurbishing three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help her husband control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a world driven by the rage and anxiety that underpins a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. On one occasion she says that she's looking into the killing so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her social media opponents would fail to comprehend, would not even see".
The Homicide Account
Thus we arrive to the actual killing – and the titular day passed by the deceased with the murderer and his associates. The author possesses great source material, and knows hour by hour what occurred as Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He sought a sexual encounter but seems amiably to have occupied the day in the company of her associates, mooching around fixing his automobile and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.
Obsession and Unfinished Business
The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who comes alive partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
