The new book features individuals chasing after new beginnings, attempting to leave behind substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into aggression. The author often employs the phrase "clean slate", rendering it intentionally weary through its repetitions. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the story. And yet, the author herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, as this presents as a new kind of book – observational, authentically narrative. But then it reveals itself to be laden with the familiar conflicts and approaches as her previous works.
From Chance Novelist to Iconic Work
The writer started out as an visual artist who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, converting intimate women's literature from humiliation into defiance. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style brought to the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a nonconformist creator who had become a major property owner, so there was much discussion on real estate deals. It is logical that she presently aims to explore new kinds of material, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a moment when she states that Trumpian politics makes confessional writing obsolete.
Three Generations, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, encompassing three generations – all unable to escape their backgrounds. There is the narrative about Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, transitioning from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a town long abandoned by progressive politics only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.
As a reader drawn to honed writing of the kind Kraus typically rejects, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the first section.
As a reader who favors crafted language of the variety that Kraus often disregards, I was captivated by the literary tone of the first section. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates small details, like the pail that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the start of the story, assisted by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a nice toy", he answers, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like piece candy". She tells Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not entirely her own."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was destined to be disappointed when I wished this different style could persist to the end. The author states here that she resents the pleasure audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she has in common with her hero 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 Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help her husband manage his alcohol use. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a society driven by the anger and fear that powers an electoral success. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "author" to "real estate holder" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to be overly concerned about this. In a moment she remarks that she's investigating the murder so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her social media opponents would fail to comprehend, would overlook entirely".
The Killing Story
So then we come to the homicide in question – and the referenced day spent by the murdered individual with the killer and his associates. Kraus utilizes excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what occurred as the victim 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 individual with mental health challenges who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.
Fascination and Incompletion
The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and daring boundary-pushing clash in this segment. Yet I wished her to explore more thoroughly her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partly through Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The complete segment feels oddly unfinished, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
