The Four Spent the Day Together centers on individuals pursuing fresh starts, attempting to leave behind drugs or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into conflict. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", making it intentionally weary through its repetitions. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the story. At the same time, the author herself appears to be undertaking her individual reinvention, because this appears a novel form of writing – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. However it proves to be filled with the same dilemmas and styles as her previous works.
From Chance Novelist to Iconic Work
Kraus started out as an visual artist who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating intimate women's literature from abjection into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the letter form 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 much discussion on property transactions. It follows that she currently desires to try out new kinds of material, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a period in which she claims that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature obsolete.
Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering three generations – none able to break free from their pasts. We encounter the story of characters Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, transitioning from the urban environment to a pastoral setting. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of Catt Greene, confronting the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one directionless individual by another in a community largely deserted by liberal ideals only a short distance from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader fond of polished prose of the kind Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the first section.
Being a reader who appreciates precise prose of the style that Kraus usually avoids, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. There is a novel degree of detail that allows space for minutiae, like the bucket that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the start of the story, helped by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a great plaything", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."
Frustration and Disruption
I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her idol Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her past books comes back in the second segment. Catt Greene is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as Paul moves between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a world fueled by the anger and fear that powers Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on social media, her professional designation altered from "author" to "real estate holder" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn something about an the nation that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would not even see".
The Homicide Account
Thus we arrive to the homicide in question – and the titular day spent by the victim with the perpetrator and his friends. Kraus utilizes excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what occurred as Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, wandering about 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 frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her personal fixations here. The standout figure is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partially because of Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the point that her narrative ends almost mid-par
