This latest work is populated with protagonists chasing after fresh starts, attempting to leave behind substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into conflict. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", rendering it intentionally weary through recurring use. Examples include "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the story. Meanwhile, the author herself seems to be making her own fresh start, since this presents as a different type of work – observational, authentically narrative. Yet it proves to be filled with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as her previous works.
From Chance Novelist to Iconic Work
The writer started out as an artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, converting intimate women's literature from humiliation into assassination. She kept producing books, but the following three compelling and abrasive novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style brought to the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a renegade artist who had evolved into a major property owner, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It follows that she currently desires to explore new kinds of material, turning outward to external narratives, at a period in which she states that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature redundant.
Several Eras, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning three generations – all unable to escape their pasts. The book includes the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, transitioning from the New York borough to a pastoral setting. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a community largely deserted by progressive politics only 80 miles from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader fond of polished prose of the kind Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the literary tone of the opening part.
As a reader drawn to honed writing of the style that the author usually avoids, I was captivated by the literary tone of the opening segment. There is a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for minutiae, like the pail that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a nice toy", he answers, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like sweet treats". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not entirely her own."
Frustration and Disruption
I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this fresh tone could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the unpolished style she shares with her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her past books returns in the second segment. Catt is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help her husband control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a environment fueled by the rage and anxiety that underpins an electoral success. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her occupation changed from "writer" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. In a moment she says that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she could potentially understand something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".
The Murder Narrative
So then we come to the murder itself – and the referenced day passed by the victim with the killer and his companions. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, loitering fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by her romantic interest Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.
Fascination and Incompletion
The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to go further into her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who comes alive in part due to the protagonist's connection to her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par
