The new book centers on individuals chasing after new beginnings, struggling to escape substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into violence. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into intentionally weary through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" recur in the text. And yet, she is embarking on her own fresh start, as this presents as a new kind of book – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. However it proves to be packed with the familiar conflicts and styles as her previous works.
From Accidental Writer to Iconic Work
The writer started out as an creative who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating confessional female writing from self-debasement into defiance. She continued writing, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels lacked the impact and rawness that the correspondence format infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a maverick maker who had turned into a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It follows that she presently aims to explore different types of content, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a time when she states that current political era renders personal narrative redundant.
Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning multiple eras – all unable to escape their backgrounds. The book includes the narrative about Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, moving from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of Catt Greene, confronting the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a locality long abandoned by liberal ideals only a short distance from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.
As a reader drawn to refined literature of the kind the author herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the narrative style of the first section.
Being a reader who favors precise prose of the kind that the author tends to eschew, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the first section. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that makes room for minutiae, like the pail that the young Catt dislodges from ice at the opening of the book, helped by her adored dad. "I found an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a nice toy", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". The author narrates Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she resents the pleasure those who appreciate polished prose have derived from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels returns in the central part. Catt is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while moving between Minnesota and LA, failing to help her husband control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul moves between poorly supported positions as an recovery specialist in a society driven by the anger and fear that underpins Trump's victory. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on a platform, her occupation changed from "novelist" to "property owner" on a reference site. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she says that she's looking into the killing so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would overlook entirely".
The Killing Story
Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the titular day experienced by the victim with the murderer and his associates. Kraus utilizes great source material, and knows hour by hour what happened when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He sought a sexual encounter but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, mooching around fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.
Fascination and Incompletion
The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to go further into her own obsessions here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who gains dimension partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par
