This latest work features individuals pursuing clean slates, attempting to leave behind substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into aggression. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", transforming it into deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Examples include "He aimed to start over" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the narrative. At the same time, Kraus herself seems to be making her own fresh start, since this presents as a different type of work – fact-based, truly literary. But then it proves to be packed with the same dilemmas and approaches as past novels.
From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic
The writer was originally an visual artist who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating confessional female writing from self-debasement into rebellion. She continued writing, but the following three compelling and abrasive novels missed the impact and rawness that the epistolary style brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a renegade artist who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It follows that she presently aims to try out new kinds of material, directing her gaze to other people's stories, at a time when she claims that current political era renders personal narrative unnecessary.
Three Generations, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning multiple eras – none able to break free from their histories. We encounter the story of Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, relocating from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the guise of Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband Paul. Finally the story of the murder of one directionless individual by another in a town mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.
For this reader attracted to polished prose of the sort Kraus tends to eschew, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the first section.
As a reader drawn to crafted language of the kind that Kraus tends to eschew, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the first section. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that makes room for small details, like the pail that the young Catt frees from the ice at the opening of the book, helped by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like sweet treats". She tells Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."
Frustration and Disruption
I was fated to feel let down when I expected this fresh tone could continue through the novel. Kraus says here that she resents the satisfaction readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to disruption, to the unpolished style she has in common with her hero Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels returns in the second segment. Catt Greene is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid her husband control his drinking. She feels helpless as her spouse cycles through poorly supported positions as an addiction therapist in a world propelled by the hostility and dread that drives a political win. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her listed profession modified from "writer" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she states that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".
The Homicide Account
Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the referenced day passed by the deceased 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 encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, wandering about getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for aggressive outbursts.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt develops an obsession by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partially because of Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she fails to enact these dialogues. This entire part feels oddly unfinished, to the point that her narrative ends almost mid-par
