🔗 Share this article

The Four Spent the Day Together features characters seeking new beginnings, struggling to escape substance abuse or harmful partnerships, only to see hope turn into violence. Kraus frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", making it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the text. Meanwhile, Kraus herself seems to be making her own fresh start, because this seems a new kind of book – documentarian, truly literary. Yet it turns out to be laden with the same dilemmas and approaches as past novels.

From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book

The writer began as an visual artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, converting intimate women's literature from humiliation into rebellion. She continued writing, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels lacked the impact and rawness that the epistolary style brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a renegade artist who had evolved into a major property owner, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It makes sense that she presently aims to explore fresh narrative sources, turning outward to other people's stories, at a moment when she states that contemporary political climate turns intimate literature unnecessary.

Three Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning three generations – each trapped by their backgrounds. There is the tale of characters Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, transitioning from the Bronx to a pastoral setting. There is the account of Kraus, in the persona of Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a community mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.

For this reader drawn to honed writing of the sort Kraus herself often avoids, I was captivated by the narrative style of the initial segment.

Being a reader drawn to crafted language of the kind that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was won over by the literary tone of the opening segment. There is a novel degree of detail that accommodates trivial aspects, like the container that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a great plaything", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like sweet treats". She tells Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – 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 says here that she is annoyed by the pleasure readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her inspiration Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books reasserts itself in the second segment. The protagonist is working on refurbishing multiple decrepit residences in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting Paul manage his alcohol use. She feels helpless as Paul moves between poorly supported positions as an addiction therapist in a society driven by the hostility and dread that underpins an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her listed profession modified from "author" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. In a moment she says that she's investigating the murder so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would be unable to grasp, would not even see".

The Homicide Account

So then we come to the actual killing – and the eponymous day spent by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his associates. Kraus utilizes compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when the victim Brandon came to meet Brittney after connecting via an application where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but seems affably to have spent the day in the company of her associates, loitering getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to go further into her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who gains dimension in part due to the protagonist's connection to her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par