This latest work features individuals chasing after new beginnings, struggling to escape substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Kraus often employs the phrase "fresh start", making it deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" are scattered across the story. And yet, she seems to be making her personal new beginning, because this seems a novel form of writing – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. However it turns out to be laden with the familiar conflicts and styles as her previous works.
From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic
The writer was originally an visual artist who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating confessional female writing from abjection into rebellion. She kept producing books, but the following three fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the impact and rawness that the epistolary style infused into the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a renegade artist who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It follows that she now wants to explore fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to external narratives, at a moment when she states that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature unnecessary.
Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning several time periods – each trapped by their histories. We encounter the tale of Emma and Jasper, versions of the author's parents, relocating from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. Additionally the narrative of the author, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. The third thread involves the story of the murder of one directionless individual by another in a community long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from the protagonist's home in rural Minnesota.
As a reader drawn to honed writing of the sort Kraus herself typically rejects, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the first section.
As someone who reads drawn to crafted language of the kind that Kraus usually avoids, I was won over by the literary tone of the initial part. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for trivial aspects, like the container that the young Catt dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her cherished parent. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like hard candy". Kraus writes Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was destined to be disappointed when I hoped this different style could persist to the end. The author states here that she is annoyed by the satisfaction audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her hero author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels comes back in the middle section. Catt Greene is working on refurbishing three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between two different states, failing to help her husband control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as Paul cycles through underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a society driven by the anger and fear that underpins a political win. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "landlord" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she says that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she might be able to learn something about an the nation that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".
The Murder Narrative
Thus we arrive to the homicide in question – and the titular day spent by the victim with the killer and his associates. Kraus has excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what transpired when the victim Brandon came to meet Brittney after connecting via an application where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, mooching around getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by Brittney's partner Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.
Obsession and Unfinished Business
Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The standout figure is Brittney, who comes alive partly through Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par
