This latest work features characters chasing after new beginnings, trying to break free from addictions or harmful partnerships, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. Kraus frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", making it intentionally weary through its repetitions. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the story. Meanwhile, she seems to be making her own fresh start, since this seems a new kind of book – observational, authentically narrative. Yet it turns out to be packed with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as her previous works.
From Chance Novelist to Iconic Work
Kraus was originally an visual artist who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, converting intimate women's literature from humiliation into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style brought to the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a maverick maker who had turned into a extensive real estate holder, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It is logical that she now wants to try out different types of content, turning outward to the experiences of others, at a period in which she claims that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing obsolete.
Three Generations, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering multiple eras – each trapped by their pasts. We encounter the story of characters Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, transitioning from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a locality largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.
For this reader drawn to refined literature of the kind the author herself tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the opening part.
Being a reader who favors precise prose of the kind that Kraus often disregards, I was captivated by the storytelling approach of the first section. It possesses a fresh level of observation that accommodates small details, like the pail that the protagonist as a child dislodges from ice at the start of the story, helped by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms rolling around 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 entirely her own."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this different style could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she dislikes the satisfaction audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books returns in the second segment. The protagonist is working on refurbishing multiple decrepit residences in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a society propelled by the rage and anxiety that drives an electoral success. A significant portion discusses about Catt being cancelled on social media, her occupation changed from "author" to "real estate holder" on a reference site. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her online critics would not understand, would overlook entirely".
The Killing Story
Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the referenced day experienced by the victim with the killer and his companions. Kraus utilizes great source material, and knows hour by hour what transpired when a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day in the company of her associates, mooching around fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt develops an obsession by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who gains dimension partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the point that her narrative ends almost mid-par
