This latest work features characters pursuing clean slates, attempting to leave behind substance abuse or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into aggression. The author frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", making it willfully cynical through recurring use. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" recur in the text. At the same time, the author herself appears to be undertaking her personal new beginning, as this appears a different type of work – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. But then it turns out to be packed with the recurring issues and styles as past novels.
From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic
The writer was originally an artist who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating intimate women's literature from self-debasement into assassination. She continued writing, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the impact and rawness that the correspondence format brought to the voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a nonconformist creator who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on housing investments. It makes sense that she now wants to explore fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a period in which she asserts that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative redundant.
Several Eras, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, spanning multiple eras – each trapped by their backgrounds. The book includes the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, relocating from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction a man named Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a town long abandoned by progressive politics only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in rural Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader attracted to refined literature of the sort Kraus typically rejects, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.
As someone who reads who appreciates precise prose of the kind that Kraus usually avoids, I was captivated by the storytelling approach of the first section. There is a fresh level of observation that allows space for minutiae, like the bucket that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the start of the story, assisted by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the nuanced interpretations of terms rolling around in their mouths like sweet treats". She tells Emma's narrative with curiosity and intimacy. "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 persist to the end. The author states here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment those who appreciate polished prose have gotten from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels returns in the middle section. Catt is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between two different states, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as her spouse moves between low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a world propelled by the anger and fear that powers an electoral success. A significant portion discusses about Catt's social media ostracism on social media, her listed profession modified from "writer" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. In a moment she says that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she could potentially understand something about an the nation that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".
The Homicide Account
So then we come to the murder itself – and the eponymous day passed by the victim with the killer and his associates. The author possesses excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what happened when a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He sought a sexual encounter but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, mooching around getting his car mended 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 frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I found myself captivated 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 explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who comes alive partly through the protagonist's connection to her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par
