🔗 Share this article

This latest work centers on protagonists seeking clean slates, attempting to leave behind substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. Kraus often employs the phrase "new beginning", transforming it into intentionally weary through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the story. And yet, the author herself seems to be making her personal new beginning, since this seems a new kind of book – documentarian, truly literary. However it proves to be packed with the recurring issues and styles as her previous works.

From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic

Kraus began as an visual artist who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, converting personal female narrative from self-debasement into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the following three compelling and abrasive novels missed the power and directness that the correspondence format infused into the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a nonconformist creator who had evolved into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It is logical that she currently desires to try out different types of content, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a period in which she asserts that contemporary political climate turns intimate literature unnecessary.

Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning several time periods – each trapped by their backgrounds. We encounter the story of characters Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, moving from the Bronx to a pastoral setting. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the character of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband her husband Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a locality mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.

As a reader attracted to polished prose of the type Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the first section.

As a reader who appreciates precise prose of the kind that Kraus often disregards, I was seduced by the literary tone of the first section. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for minutiae, like the pail that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the opening of the book, assisted by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a nice toy", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". She tells the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was destined to be disappointed when I hoped this different style could continue through the novel. Kraus says here that she dislikes the pleasure audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to disruption, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her idol Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels comes back in the second segment. The protagonist is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between Minnesota and LA, unable to aid Paul manage his alcohol use. She experiences powerlessness as Paul moves between underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a environment fueled by the rage and anxiety that underpins an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "real estate holder" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. In a moment she states that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she might be able to learn something about an the nation that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even see".

The Murder Narrative

So then we come to the homicide in question – and the referenced day experienced by the deceased with the killer and his companions. Kraus has great source material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when the victim Brandon came to see Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, loitering fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who gains dimension partly through Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels oddly unfinished, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par