The Four Spent the Day Together centers on characters chasing after new beginnings, struggling to escape addictions or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into aggression. The author frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the story. And yet, she appears to be undertaking her personal new beginning, because this appears a different type of work – fact-based, authentically narrative. However it proves to be filled with the familiar conflicts and styles as earlier books.
From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book
The writer started out as an artist who entered the literary world somewhat by chance with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, structured as missives to a distant beloved, elevating personal female narrative from humiliation into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the following three engaging and challenging novels missed the impact and rawness that the epistolary style infused into the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a maverick maker who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It makes sense that she now wants to explore new kinds of material, directing her gaze to other people's stories, at a moment when she states that current political era turns intimate literature obsolete.
Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning three generations – none able to break free from their pasts. We encounter the story of Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, transitioning from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. There is the account of Kraus, in the persona of Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a locality mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only 80 miles from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.
For this reader attracted to refined literature of the kind the author herself often avoids, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the opening part.
Being a reader drawn to honed writing of the style that Kraus tends to eschew, I was won over by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. It exhibits a fresh level of observation that allows space for trivial aspects, like the bucket that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the opening of the book, helped by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a great plaything", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". She tells Emma's narrative with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this new voice could persist to the end. The author states here that she resents the pleasure readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels returns in the middle section. Catt Greene is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help her husband curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul transitions between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a world propelled by the hostility and dread that powers an electoral success. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her listed profession modified from "writer" to "real estate holder" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. At one point she says that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn something about an America that her social media opponents would fail to comprehend, would not even see".
The Homicide Account
So then we come to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day passed by the murdered individual with the murderer and his friends. The author possesses great source material, and knows hour by hour what happened when a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He sought a sexual encounter but seems affably to have spent the day in the company of her associates, wandering about getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by her romantic interest Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. Yet I wished her to explore more thoroughly her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who gains dimension partially because of the protagonist's connection to her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
