This latest work centers on individuals pursuing clean slates, struggling to escape drugs or toxic relationships, only to see hope turn into violence. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", rendering it deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the story. Meanwhile, she is embarking on her individual reinvention, as this appears a new kind of book – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. But then it turns out to be packed with the same dilemmas and approaches as her previous works.
From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work
The writer was originally an visual artist who entered the literary world somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, converting confessional female writing from humiliation into assassination. She kept producing books, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels lacked the impact and rawness that the epistolary style imparted to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a renegade artist who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It makes sense that she currently desires to experiment with fresh narrative sources, directing her gaze to the experiences of others, at a moment when she asserts that current political era turns intimate literature unnecessary.
Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing several time periods – all unable to escape their histories. There is the story of Emma and Jasper, versions of Kraus's parents, moving from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction her husband Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a community largely deserted by liberal ideals only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.
As a reader fond of honed writing of the sort Kraus tends to eschew, I was captivated by the narrative style of the first section.
As a reader drawn to crafted language of the style that the author usually avoids, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. It exhibits a fresh level of observation that accommodates small details, like the pail that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, assisted by her cherished parent. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a nice toy", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language rolling around in their mouths like hard candy". Kraus writes the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not entirely her own."
Frustration and Disruption
I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this fresh tone could continue through the novel. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the pleasure readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disruption, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her hero author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels reasserts itself in the second segment. Catt is working on refurbishing three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while moving between Minnesota and LA, unable to aid Paul control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul transitions between low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a society propelled by the hostility and dread that underpins a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her occupation changed from "author" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. In a moment she says that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an America that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even see".
The Homicide Account
Then we reach to the murder itself – and the eponymous day experienced by the victim with the perpetrator and his associates. Kraus has compelling foundational content, and details moment by moment what transpired when Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He sought a sexual encounter but seems affably to have spent the day in the company of her associates, mooching around getting his car mended and funding treats and narcotics, before being shot by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for aggressive outbursts.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and reckless transgression clash in this segment. Yet I wished her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the point that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
