The Four Spent the Day Together centers on characters chasing after fresh starts, struggling to escape substance abuse or harmful partnerships, only to see hope turn into conflict. The author frequently uses the phrase "fresh start", transforming it into willfully cynical through its repetitions. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the text. At the same time, Kraus herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, as this presents as a novel form of writing – fact-based, authentically narrative. However it turns out to be filled with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as earlier books.
From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic
Kraus was originally an artist who transitioned to writing unintentionally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating intimate women's literature from self-debasement into defiance. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels missed the power and directness that the correspondence format brought to the voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a nonconformist creator who had turned into a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It makes sense that she currently desires to try out different types of content, directing her gaze to the experiences of others, at a period in which she states that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing obsolete.
Several Eras, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing several time periods – none able to break free from their backgrounds. The book includes the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, relocating from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a locality mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader attracted to polished prose of the sort Kraus tends to eschew, I was seduced by the literary tone of the opening part.
As someone who reads who appreciates crafted language of the style that the author often disregards, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the first section. It possesses a novel degree of detail that allows space for small details, like the pail that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, helped by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she exclaims; "a nice toy", he answers, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". She tells Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."
Frustration and Disruption
I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this different style could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she resents the pleasure readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books returns in the central part. Catt is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while shuttling between two different states, unsuccessful in assisting Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a world fueled by the hostility and dread that powers Trump's victory. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her occupation changed from "novelist" to "landlord" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to be overly concerned about this. In a moment she says 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 fail to comprehend, would not even see".
The Homicide Account
Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the titular day passed by the victim with the murderer and his companions. Kraus utilizes great source material, and knows hour by hour what happened when a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day in the company of her associates, loitering getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and daring boundary-pushing clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who comes alive partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl spiraling out of control in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
