The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with individuals chasing after clean slates, struggling to escape addictions or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into intentionally weary through recurring use. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the text. Meanwhile, Kraus herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, as this appears a different type of work – documentarian, authentically narrative. But then it turns out to be laden with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as past novels.
From Accidental Writer to Iconic Work
Kraus began as an creative who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, transforming intimate women's literature from abjection into defiance. She kept producing books, but the following three engaging and challenging novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format infused into the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a maverick maker who had become a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It follows that she presently aims to try out different types of content, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a time when she states that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature redundant.
Three Generations, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering several time periods – each trapped by their backgrounds. The book includes the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, transitioning from the New York borough to a pastoral setting. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction her husband Paul. Finally the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a locality mostly forsaken by liberal ideals only 80 miles from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.
As a reader drawn to honed writing of the kind Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the narrative style of the initial segment.
Being a reader who appreciates precise prose of the variety that the author often disregards, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the first section. There is a novel degree of detail that allows space for minutiae, like the container that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, helped by her adored dad. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a great plaything", he answers, "the nuanced interpretations of terms tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". She tells Emma's narrative with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was fated to feel let down when I hoped this new voice could persist to the end. The author states here that she resents the enjoyment readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she echoes from her idol author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels comes back in the second segment. Catt is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help her husband control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as her spouse moves between low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a environment fueled by the rage and anxiety that powers an electoral success. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on a platform, her listed profession modified from "writer" to "property owner" on a reference site. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. On one occasion she states that she's looking into the killing so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn something about an America that her social media opponents would fail to comprehend, would not even perceive".
The Killing Story
Then we reach to the murder itself – and the referenced day experienced by the victim with the murderer and his companions. Kraus utilizes great source material, and reconstructs step by step what occurred as the victim Brandon came to meet Brittney after connecting via an application where she sold sex pictures. He sought a sexual encounter but seems amiably to have occupied the day with her companions, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I found myself captivated by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who comes alive in part due to the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels strangely incomplete, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
