The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with protagonists seeking fresh starts, attempting to leave behind substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into conflict. The author often employs the phrase "fresh start", transforming it into intentionally weary through recurring use. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" appear throughout the text. And yet, Kraus herself is embarking on her individual reinvention, because this seems a new kind of book – fact-based, truly literary. However it proves to be packed with the same dilemmas and approaches as past novels.
From Accidental Writer to Iconic Work
Kraus started out as an artist who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as missives to a distant beloved, converting confessional female writing from abjection into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a maverick maker who had turned into a major property owner, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It is logical that she presently aims to try out fresh narrative sources, turning outward to external narratives, at a period in which she states that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature obsolete.
Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, encompassing multiple eras – all unable to escape their histories. There is the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, representations of Kraus's parents, relocating from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. There is the account of Kraus, in the character of Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband her husband Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a locality mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.
For this reader attracted to refined literature of the sort Kraus herself often avoids, I was seduced by the literary tone of the first section.
Being a reader who appreciates precise prose of the variety that Kraus usually avoids, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for small details, like the pail that the young Catt dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her adored dad. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a great plaything", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". Kraus writes Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this fresh tone could last out the book. Kraus says here that she resents the satisfaction readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she shares with her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels comes back in the second segment. The protagonist is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between Minnesota and LA, unable to aid Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a society driven by the hostility and dread that powers an electoral success. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to be overly concerned about this. At one point she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an America that her online critics would not understand, would overlook entirely".
The Killing Story
Then we reach to the actual killing – and the titular day passed by the murdered individual with the killer and his friends. The author possesses great source material, and details moment by moment what transpired when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day in the company of her associates, loitering having his vehicle repaired and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by her romantic interest Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
Catt develops an obsession by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who gains dimension in part due to the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she fails to enact these dialogues. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the point that her narrative ends almost mid-par
