The Four Spent the Day Together centers on individuals chasing after clean slates, struggling to escape substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into conflict. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into intentionally weary through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the text. At the same time, she appears to be undertaking her individual reinvention, since this seems a novel form of writing – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. However it reveals itself to be filled with the familiar conflicts and styles as past novels.
From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book
The writer started out as an artist who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating intimate women's literature from self-debasement into assassination. She kept producing books, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels missed the power and directness that the epistolary style imparted to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a renegade artist who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It makes sense that she now wants to explore different types of content, looking outwards to external narratives, at a moment when she states that current political era turns intimate literature redundant.
Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering multiple eras – each trapped by their backgrounds. There is the narrative about Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, moving from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one directionless individual by another in a community mostly forsaken by liberal ideals only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.
As a reader attracted to honed writing of the kind the author herself typically rejects, I was captivated by the narrative style of the initial segment.
Being a reader drawn to honed writing of the kind that the author often disregards, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the first section. It possesses a novel degree of detail that allows space for trivial aspects, like the container that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, helped by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a nice toy", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language rolling around in their mouths like hard candy". The author narrates Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."
Frustration and Disruption
I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this new voice could continue through the novel. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment those who appreciate polished prose have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels reasserts itself in the second segment. The protagonist is working on refurbishing three dozen dilapidated units in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while moving between Minnesota and LA, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a environment fueled by the hostility and dread that drives a political win. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her occupation changed from "novelist" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she says that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she might be able to learn something about an the United States that her social media opponents would fail to comprehend, would not even perceive".
The Murder Narrative
Thus we arrive to the actual killing – and the referenced day passed by the victim with the perpetrator and his friends. Kraus has excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, wandering about getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.
Fascination and Incompletion
The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and reckless transgression clash in this segment. Yet I wished her to explore more thoroughly her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who gains dimension partly through Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. The author informs us that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par
