The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with protagonists chasing after clean slates, struggling to escape drugs or harmful partnerships, only to see hope turn into conflict. Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", making it intentionally weary through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the text. Meanwhile, Kraus herself is embarking on her own fresh start, since this seems a different type of work – fact-based, authentically narrative. However it reveals itself to be filled with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as earlier books.
From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book
Kraus was originally an artist who transitioned to writing unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating intimate women's literature from abjection into assassination. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format imparted to the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a nonconformist creator who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It makes sense that she now wants to experiment with new kinds of material, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a period in which she states that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative obsolete.
Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering three generations – all unable to escape their histories. The book includes the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, relocating from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. There is the account of Kraus, in the guise of Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction her husband Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a town largely deserted by progressive politics only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader fond of honed writing of the sort the author herself typically rejects, I was seduced by the narrative style of the first section.
Being a reader who favors honed writing of the variety that Kraus herself often disregards, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for small details, like the pail that the young Catt dislodges from ice at the start of the story, aided by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she exclaims; "a nice toy", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like sweet treats". She tells the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."
Frustration and Disruption
I was fated to feel let down when I hoped this fresh tone could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she resents the satisfaction audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she has in common with her inspiration Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books comes back in the central part. The protagonist is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while moving between Minnesota and LA, failing to help her husband curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through poorly supported positions as an recovery specialist in a world propelled by the hostility and dread that powers a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her occupation changed from "writer" to "property owner" on a reference site. The author still appears to be overly concerned 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 America that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even see".
The Homicide Account
Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day spent by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his friends. Kraus has compelling foundational content, and knows hour by hour what happened when Brandon came to visit Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day in the company of her associates, mooching around getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.
Obsession and Unfinished Business
Catt develops an obsession by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing clash in this segment. Yet I wished her to explore more thoroughly her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who comes alive partly through Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl spiraling out of control in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels oddly unfinished, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
