The Four Spent the Day Together features protagonists pursuing clean slates, struggling to escape drugs or harmful partnerships, only to see hope turn into violence. The author frequently uses the phrase "new beginning", making it deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the narrative. And yet, the author herself is embarking on her individual reinvention, since this appears a different type of work – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. However it proves to be packed with the same dilemmas and styles as past novels.
From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book
The writer started out as an artist who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating confessional female writing from humiliation into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the power and directness that the epistolary style imparted to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a nonconformist creator who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on real estate deals. It makes sense that she presently aims to experiment with different types of content, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a period in which she asserts that current political era turns intimate literature obsolete.
Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering multiple eras – all unable to escape their backgrounds. There is the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, transitioning from the urban environment to a pastoral setting. There is the account of Kraus, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the late recognition of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, 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 liberal ideals only a short distance from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.
For this reader fond of honed writing of the sort the author herself often avoids, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.
As a reader drawn to crafted language of the style that Kraus tends to eschew, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the initial part. There is a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for small details, like the pail that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the start of the story, aided by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a great plaything", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like piece candy". Kraus writes Emma's story with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not entirely her own."
Frustration and Disruption
I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this different style could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the satisfaction readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to disruption, to the unpolished style she echoes from her idol Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books reasserts itself in the middle section. Catt is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between two different states, unsuccessful in assisting Paul control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through poorly supported positions as an addiction therapist in a world fueled by the anger and fear that underpins an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "landlord" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. In a moment she states that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even see".
The Homicide Account
So then we come to the murder itself – and the eponymous day experienced by the victim with the killer and his companions. Kraus utilizes excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she offered adult photos. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
Catt develops an obsession by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her own obsessions here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who comes alive partly through the protagonist's connection to her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
