The new book is populated with characters chasing after fresh starts, struggling to escape substance abuse or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Kraus often employs the phrase "new beginning", making it deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the narrative. At the same time, Kraus herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, since this appears a novel form of writing – fact-based, authentically narrative. However it reveals itself to be packed with the familiar conflicts and approaches as her previous works.
From Accidental Writer to Iconic Work
Kraus began as an visual artist who entered the literary world somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming personal female narrative from abjection into rebellion. She continued writing, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels missed the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a renegade artist who had become a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It makes sense that she currently desires to explore new kinds of material, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a moment when she claims that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature obsolete.
Several Eras, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing multiple eras – all unable to escape their backgrounds. There is the story of Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, moving from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. There is the narrative of the author, in the character of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband a man named Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a community mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.
As a reader drawn to refined literature of the kind Kraus often avoids, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the initial segment.
Being a reader who favors precise prose of the style that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the initial part. It exhibits a fresh level of observation that makes room for minutiae, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child dislodges from ice at the opening of the book, assisted by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was fated to feel let down when I wished this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she resents the satisfaction readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disruption, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels reasserts itself 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, unable to aid her husband manage his alcohol use. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a society fueled by the hostility and dread that powers a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her professional designation altered from "author" to "real estate holder" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. In a moment she says that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even see".
The Killing Story
Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day passed by the murdered individual with the murderer and his companions. The author possesses excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what occurred as a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but seems affably to have spent the day with her companions, mooching around getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and reckless transgression clash in this segment. Yet I wished her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who gains dimension partially because of Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
