The new book centers on individuals pursuing fresh starts, attempting to leave behind drugs or toxic relationships, only to witness hope devolve into violence. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", making it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" recur in the narrative. At the same time, the author herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, since this seems a novel form of writing – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. However it turns out to be filled with the familiar conflicts and approaches as past novels.
From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book
The writer began as an artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating personal female narrative from self-debasement into rebellion. She kept producing books, but the following three fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the impact and rawness that the correspondence format imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a maverick maker who had evolved into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on real estate deals. It makes sense that she currently desires to explore different types of content, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a time when she claims that Trumpian politics renders personal narrative redundant.
Multiple Generations, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering several time periods – all unable to escape their pasts. We encounter the story of Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, moving from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her partner struggling with addiction her husband Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one directionless individual by another in a locality mostly forsaken by progressive politics only a short distance from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.
As a reader attracted to polished prose of the sort Kraus typically rejects, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the opening part.
As a reader who appreciates 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 minutiae, like the pail that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he answers, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like piece candy". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she dislikes the pleasure audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels reasserts itself in the second segment. The protagonist is attempting to do up multiple decrepit residences in the city's most challenging districts while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul manage his alcohol use. She feels helpless as Paul transitions between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a world fueled by the hostility and dread that underpins Trump's victory. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on social media, her occupation changed from "novelist" to "real estate holder" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. On one occasion she remarks that she's investigating the murder so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would be unable to grasp, would not even see".
The Homicide Account
So then we come to the homicide in question – and the titular day experienced by the victim with the murderer and his companions. The author possesses excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, 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 often been institutionalized for fits of anger.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I found myself captivated by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and daring boundary-pushing wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to go further into her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par
