The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with characters chasing after fresh starts, trying to break free from addictions or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into violence. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", making it deliberately jaded through recurring use. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They opted for a clean break" are scattered across the narrative. Meanwhile, Kraus herself is embarking on her individual reinvention, as this appears a novel form of writing – documentarian, authentically narrative. However it reveals itself to be filled with the same dilemmas and styles as past novels.
From Accidental Writer to Iconic Work
The writer was originally an visual artist who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming personal female narrative from humiliation into defiance. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels lacked the power and directness that the correspondence format imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her role as a renegade artist who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It is logical that she currently desires to experiment with fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a time when she states that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative unnecessary.
Multiple Generations, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, encompassing three generations – none able to break free from their backgrounds. There is the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, moving from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the character of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning 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 troubled youth by another in a town mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only 80 miles from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.
For this reader attracted to polished prose of the kind the author herself often avoids, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the opening part.
As someone who reads who appreciates crafted language of the kind that Kraus herself often disregards, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. There is a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for trivial aspects, like the container that the protagonist as a child dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her cherished parent. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a nice toy", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words rolling around in their mouths like sweet treats". Kraus writes Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."
Frustration and Disruption
I was fated to feel let down when I hoped this different style could persist to the end. The author states here that she dislikes the enjoyment audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to disruption, to the unpolished style she has in common with her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works returns in the central part. The protagonist is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between two different states, failing to help her husband curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul moves between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a world driven by the rage and anxiety that drives Trump's victory. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "landlord" on a reference site. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. In a moment she states that she's looking into the killing so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would not even see".
The Killing Story
Thus we arrive to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day passed by the murdered individual with the murderer and his friends. Kraus utilizes great source material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when the victim Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He was hoping for sex 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 boyfriend a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for aggressive outbursts.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her individual preoccupations here. The standout figure is Brittney herself, who comes alive partially because of Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels strangely incomplete, to the point that her narrative ends almost mid-par
