This latest work centers on characters chasing after new beginnings, struggling to escape substance abuse or toxic relationships, only to witness hope devolve into conflict. The author frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", making it deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They opted for a clean break" are scattered across the text. Meanwhile, she seems to be making her individual reinvention, as this appears a different type of work – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. However it turns out to be packed with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as earlier books.
From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work
Kraus was originally an visual artist who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating personal female narrative from humiliation into defiance. She continued writing, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels lacked the power and directness that the epistolary style brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her role as a nonconformist creator who had turned into a major property owner, so there was significant attention on housing investments. It is logical that she presently aims to try out different types of content, turning outward to other people's stories, at a time when she asserts that current political era turns intimate literature obsolete.
Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering three generations – none able to break free from their histories. There is the narrative about Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, relocating from the New York borough to a pastoral setting. There is the account of Kraus, in the persona of Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. Finally the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a locality long abandoned by liberal ideals only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.
As a reader drawn to refined literature of the sort the author herself often avoids, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the first section.
As someone who reads who favors precise prose of the kind that Kraus herself often disregards, I was won over by the literary tone of the first section. It possesses a novel degree of detail that accommodates small details, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a nice toy", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms rolling around in their mouths like sweet treats". Kraus writes the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not entirely her own."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this fresh tone could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the pleasure readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels reasserts itself in the second segment. Catt Greene is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid Paul control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a world fueled by the anger and fear that powers Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her listed profession modified from "author" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she says that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an America that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even perceive".
The Murder Narrative
So then we come to the murder itself – and the titular day experienced by the deceased with the killer and his companions. Kraus has compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what happened when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after connecting via an application where she offered adult photos. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, loitering having his vehicle repaired and covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her own obsessions here. The standout figure is Brittney herself, who gains dimension in part due to Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
