The Four Spent the Day Together features characters seeking clean slates, trying to break free from drugs or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. The author frequently uses the phrase "new beginning", making it willfully cynical through recurring use. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They opted for a clean break" are scattered across the story. At the same time, the author herself is embarking on her personal new beginning, because this presents as a novel form of writing – documentarian, truly literary. Yet it turns out to be laden with the familiar conflicts and styles as her previous works.
From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book
The writer 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 missives to a distant beloved, converting personal female narrative 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. It didn't help was her identity as a maverick maker who had become a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It is logical that she presently aims to explore fresh narrative sources, turning outward to the experiences of others, at a moment when she states that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature redundant.
Several Eras, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning three generations – none able to break free from their backgrounds. We encounter the narrative about Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, transitioning from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. There is the account of Kraus, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction a man named Paul. The third thread involves the story of the murder of one directionless individual by another in a community mostly forsaken by progressive politics only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.
As a reader drawn to refined literature of the type Kraus tends to eschew, I was seduced by the narrative style of the opening part.
As someone who reads who appreciates precise prose of the kind that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the first section. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that allows space for minutiae, like the pail that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". The author narrates the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was destined to be disappointed when I wished this different style could last out the book. Kraus says here that she resents the pleasure readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to disruption, to the unpolished style she echoes from her idol Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books comes back in the central part. The protagonist is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help Paul manage his alcohol use. She experiences powerlessness as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a world fueled by the rage and anxiety that powers an electoral success. A significant portion discusses about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her occupation changed from "novelist" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. At one point she remarks that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she might be able to learn something about an the nation that her social media opponents would not understand, would not even see".
The Killing Story
Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the titular day experienced by the victim with the murderer and his companions. The author possesses great source material, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she offered adult photos. He sought a sexual encounter but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, mooching around having his vehicle repaired and covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards ethical reporting and daring boundary-pushing wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman spiraling out of control in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
