The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with protagonists seeking clean slates, attempting to leave behind substance abuse or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into conflict. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the narrative. At the same time, Kraus herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, since this seems a new kind of book – documentarian, authentically narrative. Yet it turns out to be laden with the same dilemmas and styles as earlier books.
From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic
The writer started out as an artist who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating confessional female writing from abjection into assassination. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the power and directness that the epistolary style brought to the voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her role as a renegade artist who had become a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It is logical that she now wants to try out fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a period in which she states that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature obsolete.
Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering several time periods – none able to break free from their backgrounds. We encounter the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, relocating from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her partner struggling with addiction her husband Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one troubled youth by another in a community mostly forsaken by liberal ideals only a short distance from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.
As a reader attracted to honed writing of the type Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the narrative style of the initial segment.
As a reader who favors honed writing of the style that Kraus tends to eschew, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that allows space for trivial aspects, like the pail that the protagonist as a child dislodges from ice at the start of the story, assisted by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a great plaything", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like sweet treats". Kraus writes Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was fated to feel let down when I hoped this different style could continue through the novel. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the satisfaction audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disruption, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works returns in the central part. Catt Greene is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a world fueled by the hostility and dread that powers a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on a platform, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "property owner" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she states that she's investigating the murder so that before exiting the region, "she could potentially understand 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 murder itself – and the eponymous day passed by the victim with the perpetrator and his companions. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and knows hour by hour what occurred as the victim Brandon came to visit Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, wandering about fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards ethical reporting and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her own obsessions here. The standout figure is Brittney herself, who gains dimension partially because of the protagonist's connection to her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par
