🔗 Share this article

The Four Spent the Day Together features individuals chasing after fresh starts, attempting to leave behind drugs or toxic relationships, only to see hope turn into violence. The author often employs the phrase "new beginning", transforming it into deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They opted for a clean break" recur in the story. And yet, Kraus herself is embarking on her personal new beginning, because this presents as a different type of work – documentarian, truly literary. Yet it reveals itself to be packed with the recurring issues and approaches as past novels.

From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book

The writer began as an artist who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, converting intimate women's literature from abjection into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the impact and rawness that the correspondence format infused into the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a nonconformist creator who had turned into a extensive real estate holder, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It makes sense that she currently desires to explore fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to external narratives, at a moment when she asserts that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing obsolete.

Three Generations, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering multiple eras – none able to break free from their pasts. The book includes the narrative about Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, moving from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. Then there is the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one directionless individual by another in a town long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.

As a reader fond of honed writing of the sort the author herself typically rejects, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.

As a reader who appreciates honed writing of the variety that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. It possesses a novel degree of detail that accommodates small details, like the pail that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the opening of the book, assisted by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a nice toy", he answers, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was fated to feel let down when I expected this fresh tone could continue through the novel. Kraus notes here that she resents the enjoyment readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her past books returns in the central part. Catt is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while moving between two different states, unsuccessful in assisting Paul control his drinking. She feels helpless as her spouse moves between low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a environment driven by the anger and fear that underpins a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "landlord" on a reference site. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she remarks that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an America that her social media opponents would be unable to grasp, would overlook entirely".

The Murder Narrative

Then we reach to the actual killing – and the eponymous day experienced by the victim with the killer and his friends. Kraus has great source material, and details moment by moment what occurred as Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied 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 Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for aggressive outbursts.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to go further into her own obsessions here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partially because of Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par