This latest work features individuals seeking fresh starts, trying to break free from substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. Kraus frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", rendering it intentionally weary through constant reiteration. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the story. Meanwhile, Kraus herself appears to be undertaking her own fresh start, because this appears a novel form of writing – documentarian, truly literary. However it proves to be filled with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as her previous works.
From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic
Kraus started out as an artist who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating personal female narrative from abjection into defiance. She continued writing, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the impact and rawness that the epistolary style infused into the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her role as a maverick maker who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It follows that she now wants to explore fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to external narratives, at a moment when she states that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing 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 tale of Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, transitioning from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the late recognition of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a community long abandoned by progressive politics only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.
From my perspective as a reader fond of honed writing of the type Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the narrative style of the initial segment.
As someone who reads who favors honed writing of the style that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. It possesses a fresh level of observation that accommodates minutiae, like the bucket that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, assisted by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a great plaything", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". Kraus writes Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."
Frustration and Disruption
I was fated to feel let down when I hoped this different style could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the enjoyment those who appreciate polished prose have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the unpolished style she has in common with her hero author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels reasserts itself in the middle section. The protagonist is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid her husband control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as Paul cycles through poorly supported positions as an recovery specialist in a world fueled by the anger and fear that underpins Trump's victory. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her occupation changed from "novelist" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she says that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".
The Murder Narrative
So then we come to the actual killing – and the eponymous day passed by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his associates. The author possesses great source material, and details moment by moment what transpired when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, loitering having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and reckless transgression tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to go further into her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
