This latest work features protagonists chasing after new beginnings, attempting to leave behind substance abuse or toxic relationships, only to witness hope devolve into conflict. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", rendering it intentionally weary through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the story. At the same time, she seems to be making her personal new beginning, since this appears a different type of work – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. However it proves to be filled with the recurring issues and aesthetics as past novels.
From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book
The writer began as an visual artist who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, transforming personal female narrative from humiliation into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels missed the impact and rawness that the epistolary style infused into the voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her role as a maverick maker who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It follows that she presently aims to experiment with fresh narrative sources, directing her gaze to the experiences of others, at a time when she claims that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing unnecessary.
Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, encompassing several time periods – all unable to escape their backgrounds. There is the story of characters Emma and Jasper, versions of Kraus's parents, transitioning from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. Then there is the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a community long abandoned by liberal ideals only a short distance from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.
For this reader fond of honed writing of the kind Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the narrative style of the opening part.
As someone who reads who appreciates honed writing of the variety that Kraus tends to eschew, I was won over by the literary tone of the initial part. It exhibits a fresh level of observation that allows space for trivial aspects, like the container that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the opening of the book, helped by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like hard candy". She tells Emma's narrative with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."
Frustration and Disruption
I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this fresh tone could persist to the end. The author states here that she is annoyed by the satisfaction readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her inspiration Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works reasserts itself in the middle section. Catt is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul manage his alcohol use. She is overwhelmed as her spouse transitions between low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a world propelled by the hostility and dread that underpins an electoral success. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on social media, her listed profession modified from "author" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. On one occasion she remarks that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an America that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".
The Homicide Account
Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day passed by the victim with the killer and his companions. Kraus utilizes excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, loitering getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
Catt develops an obsession by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who becomes vivid in part due to the protagonist's connection to her – another bright, bullied girl spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par
