This latest work features characters chasing after fresh starts, trying to break free from substance abuse or toxic relationships, only to witness hope devolve into violence. Kraus frequently uses the phrase "new beginning", making it deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" recur in the story. Meanwhile, the author herself seems to be making her personal new beginning, since this presents as a novel form of writing – observational, truly literary. Yet it reveals itself to be packed with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as earlier books.
From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book
The writer 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, transforming confessional female writing from abjection into defiance. She kept producing books, but the following three engaging and challenging novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the letter form imparted to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her position as a renegade artist who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It follows that she presently aims to experiment with fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a period in which she asserts that contemporary political climate turns intimate literature unnecessary.
Three Generations, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering multiple eras – each trapped by their pasts. The book includes the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, relocating from the Bronx to a pastoral setting. There is the narrative of the author, in the guise of Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband a man named Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a community largely deserted by progressive politics only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader fond of polished prose of the sort Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the first section.
Being a reader who favors crafted language of the variety that the author tends to eschew, I was won over by the literary tone of the first section. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates small details, like the pail that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like sweet treats". The author narrates the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was fated to feel let down when I expected this fresh tone could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the pleasure those who appreciate polished prose have gotten from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she has in common with her hero Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works comes back in the middle section. The protagonist is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as her spouse cycles through low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a world driven by the hostility and dread that underpins an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her occupation changed from "novelist" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she says that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even see".
The Homicide Account
So then we come to the actual killing – and the eponymous day spent by the murdered individual with the killer and his companions. Kraus has excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what occurred as a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, wandering about fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has repeatedly received inpatient care for aggressive outbursts.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The standout figure is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid in part due to the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a struggling, neglected community. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
