The Four Spent the Day Together features protagonists seeking clean slates, struggling to escape addictions or harmful partnerships, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into intentionally weary through constant reiteration. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" are scattered across the narrative. And yet, the author herself is embarking on her personal new beginning, because this appears a different type of work – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. However it proves to be filled with the same dilemmas and styles as past novels.
From Chance Novelist to Iconic Work
Kraus was originally an visual artist who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming personal female narrative from self-debasement into assassination. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels missed the impact and rawness that the letter form brought to the voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a renegade artist who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It makes sense that she now wants to explore different types of content, directing her gaze to the experiences of others, at a period in which she claims that contemporary political climate turns intimate literature redundant.
Three Generations, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, encompassing multiple eras – each trapped by their backgrounds. The book includes the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, transitioning from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. Additionally the narrative of the author, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction her husband Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one directionless individual by another in a community long abandoned by progressive politics only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.
For this reader drawn to polished prose of the type Kraus tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the opening part.
Being a reader who appreciates honed writing of the kind that Kraus usually avoids, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the initial part. There is a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for trivial aspects, like the container that the young Catt dislodges from ice at the start of the story, helped 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 hard candy". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "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 last out the book. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the pleasure readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels returns in the central part. Catt is attempting to do up multiple decrepit residences in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting Paul manage his alcohol use. She feels helpless as her spouse transitions between underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a world fueled by the rage and anxiety that underpins Trump's victory. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her professional designation altered from "author" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she says that she's investigating the murder so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an America that her social media opponents would not understand, would not even see".
The Homicide Account
So then we come to the homicide in question – and the referenced day passed by the murdered individual with the murderer and his companions. Kraus has great source material, and details moment by moment what transpired when Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day in the company of her associates, wandering about fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner a man named 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 intrigued by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who comes alive partly through Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels oddly unfinished, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
