The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with characters chasing after clean slates, struggling to escape addictions or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into conflict. The author often employs the phrase "clean slate", making it willfully cynical through recurring use. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the story. At the same time, the author herself appears to be undertaking her own fresh start, because this seems a new kind of book – observational, genuinely novelistic. But then it turns out to be packed with the familiar conflicts and styles as past novels.
From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work
Kraus began as an artist who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, converting intimate women's literature from self-debasement into rebellion. She kept producing books, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style infused into the voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her position as a maverick maker who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on housing investments. It is logical that she now wants to try out different types of content, turning outward to other people's stories, at a period in which she claims that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing unnecessary.
Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, encompassing multiple eras – none able to break free from their backgrounds. We encounter the story of Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, transitioning from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one directionless individual by another in a community largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.
As a reader fond of refined literature of the sort Kraus often avoids, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the first section.
As someone who reads who appreciates crafted language of the variety that the author often disregards, I was won over by the novelistic voice of the initial part. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that accommodates trivial aspects, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like piece candy". The author narrates Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."
Frustration and Disruption
I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this fresh tone could continue through the novel. Kraus says here that she resents the satisfaction readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the unpolished style she has in common with her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works returns in the central part. Catt Greene is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between Minnesota and LA, unsuccessful in assisting Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a society fueled by the hostility and dread that powers an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her occupation changed from "author" to "real estate holder" on a reference site. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. At one point she states that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an America that her social media opponents would not understand, would not even see".
The Killing Story
So then we come to the murder itself – and the referenced day experienced by the victim with the killer and his friends. Kraus utilizes excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what occurred as 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 affably to have spent the day with her companions, loitering having his vehicle repaired and covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.
Obsession and Unfinished Business
Catt develops an obsession by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her personal fixations here. The standout figure is Brittney, who comes alive partially because of Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the point that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
