The new book centers on characters chasing after clean slates, struggling to escape drugs or toxic relationships, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", rendering it willfully cynical through recurring use. Phrases such as "He aimed to start over" and "They chose to begin anew" recur in the text. Meanwhile, she seems to be making her personal new beginning, as this presents as a novel form of writing – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. Yet it reveals itself to be packed with the recurring issues and aesthetics as her previous works.
From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work
The writer was originally an creative who transitioned to writing unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, transforming confessional female writing from abjection into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels missed the power and directness that the correspondence format imparted to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a nonconformist creator who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on real estate deals. It makes sense that she currently desires to explore new kinds of material, turning outward to other people's stories, at a period in which she states that current political era turns intimate literature redundant.
Several Eras, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning multiple eras – all unable to escape their pasts. There is the story of characters Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, relocating from the urban environment to a pastoral setting. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success 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 locality largely deserted by liberal ideals only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.
For this reader fond of refined literature of the kind the author herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the literary tone of the initial segment.
As someone who reads who appreciates precise prose of the kind that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for trivial aspects, like the container that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a nice toy", he replies, "the nuanced interpretations of terms rolling around in their mouths like sweet treats". The author narrates Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "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 persist to the end. Kraus says here that she dislikes the satisfaction readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books comes back in the central part. Catt Greene is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid Paul control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as her spouse cycles through low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a environment driven by the hostility and dread that underpins a political win. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on social media, her professional designation altered from "author" to "real estate holder" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. On one occasion she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an the nation that her social media opponents would not understand, would overlook entirely".
The Killing Story
Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the titular day spent by the victim with the perpetrator and his associates. Kraus has excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what happened when the victim Brandon came to visit Brittney after connecting via an application where she offered adult photos. 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 covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to delve deeper into her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who becomes vivid partially because of the protagonist's connection to her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels strangely incomplete, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
