The Four Spent the Day Together features individuals chasing after clean slates, struggling to escape addictions or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into aggression. Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", making it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the narrative. Meanwhile, she is embarking on her individual reinvention, as this presents as a novel form of writing – observational, authentically narrative. However it proves to be filled with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as earlier books.
Kraus started out as an artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting intimate women's literature from self-debasement into rebellion. She continued writing, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels lacked the power and directness that the letter form imparted to the voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a maverick maker who had turned into a extensive real estate holder, so there was significant attention on housing investments. It is logical that she currently desires to experiment with fresh narrative sources, directing her gaze to other people's stories, at a moment when she states that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature unnecessary.
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering multiple eras – all unable to escape their pasts. There is the tale of characters Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, relocating from the urban environment to a pastoral setting. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction her husband Paul. Finally the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a town mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.
For this reader fond of polished prose of the kind the author herself tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the first section.
As a reader drawn to honed writing of the variety that the author usually avoids, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. It possesses a novel degree of detail that accommodates small details, like the pail that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, aided by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a great plaything", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". She tells the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."
I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this different style could last out the book. The author states here that she resents the satisfaction readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works comes back in the second segment. Catt is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help Paul control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between poorly supported positions as an recovery specialist in a society fueled by the anger and fear that underpins a political win. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on social media, her occupation changed from "writer" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she says that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would fail to comprehend, would overlook entirely".
Thus we arrive to the actual killing – and the referenced day spent by the victim with the murderer and his companions. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and knows hour by hour what transpired when Brandon came to visit Brittney after connecting via an application where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.
Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who comes alive partly through Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par
Maya Chen is a freelance writer and urban enthusiast with a passion for documenting city life and cultural shifts.
