The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with protagonists pursuing new beginnings, struggling to escape addictions or toxic relationships, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. Kraus frequently uses the phrase "new beginning", making it deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" appear throughout the story. At the same time, the author herself appears to be undertaking her own fresh start, since this appears a novel form of writing – documentarian, authentically narrative. Yet it turns out to be packed with the same dilemmas and approaches as earlier books.
From Accidental Writer to Iconic Work
Kraus began as an visual artist who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, elevating personal female narrative from abjection into rebellion. She kept producing books, but the following three engaging and challenging novels did not possess the impact and rawness that the epistolary style imparted to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a renegade artist who had evolved into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It is logical that she currently desires to experiment with fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a time when she claims that Trumpian politics renders personal narrative unnecessary.
Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning several time periods – all unable to escape their pasts. There is the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, transitioning from the New York borough to a pastoral setting. There is the narrative of the author, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a locality mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.
As a reader fond of polished prose of the sort the author herself typically rejects, I was seduced by the narrative style of the opening part.
Being a reader drawn to precise prose of the variety that Kraus herself often disregards, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for trivial aspects, like the pail that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like piece candy". Kraus writes the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this new voice could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the pleasure those who appreciate polished prose have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels comes back in the middle section. The protagonist is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between Minnesota and LA, unable to aid her husband control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as Paul moves between poorly supported positions as an substance abuse counselor in a environment fueled by the anger and fear that powers an electoral success. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her listed profession modified from "author" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. At one point she states that she's investigating the murder so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an America that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".
The Homicide Account
Then we reach to the actual killing – and the eponymous day passed by the deceased with the perpetrator and his companions. Kraus has great source material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day with her companions, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.
Fascination and Incompletion
The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and reckless transgression tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who comes alive partly through the protagonist's connection to her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the point that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
