The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with individuals seeking new beginnings, attempting to leave behind addictions or harmful partnerships, only to see hope turn into violence. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", rendering it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the narrative. And yet, the author herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, as this appears a different type of work – fact-based, authentically narrative. Yet it proves to be filled with the recurring issues and styles as past novels.
From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book
The writer was originally an artist who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming personal female narrative from abjection into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the following three fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the power and directness that the letter form imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a renegade artist who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It follows that she currently desires to try out new kinds of material, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a period in which she asserts that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative obsolete.
Three Generations, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering several time periods – none able to break free from their histories. There is the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, moving from the urban environment to a pastoral setting. There is the narrative of the author, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one directionless individual by another in a town long abandoned by liberal ideals only a short distance from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.
As a reader drawn to polished prose of the sort Kraus herself often avoids, I was seduced by the narrative style of the first section.
Being a reader drawn to precise prose of the kind that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. There is a fresh level of observation that makes room for trivial aspects, like the pail that the protagonist as a child dislodges from ice at the start of the story, aided by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a nice toy", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was fated to feel let down when I expected this fresh tone could continue through the novel. Kraus says here that she dislikes the pleasure audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her idol Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books returns in the second segment. Catt Greene is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a world driven by the anger and fear that powers Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on a platform, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "property owner" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she says that she's looking into the killing so that before leaving Minnesota, "she could potentially understand something about an America that her online critics would not understand, would not even see".
The Murder Narrative
Thus we arrive to the homicide in question – and the titular day passed by the deceased with the murderer and his companions. The author possesses excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what happened when Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, loitering having his vehicle repaired and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, 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
