This latest work features individuals pursuing clean slates, struggling to escape substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. Kraus often employs the phrase "new beginning", rendering it willfully cynical through recurring use. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the narrative. At the same time, the author herself appears to be undertaking her individual reinvention, as this presents as a novel form of writing – fact-based, authentically narrative. Yet it turns out to be laden with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as earlier books.
From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book
The writer started out as an visual artist who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating intimate women's literature from abjection into defiance. She kept producing books, but the following three engaging and challenging novels did not possess the impact and rawness that the letter form imparted to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a renegade artist who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It makes sense that she currently desires to explore new kinds of material, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a time when she claims that current political era makes confessional writing redundant.
Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning three generations – none able to break free from their pasts. There is the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, relocating from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the character of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a community largely deserted by liberal ideals only a short distance from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.
As a reader fond of polished prose of the type Kraus herself typically rejects, I was seduced by the narrative style of the initial segment.
Being a reader who appreciates precise prose of the variety that Kraus tends to eschew, I was captivated by the literary tone of the initial part. There is a fresh level of observation that accommodates small details, like the pail that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, aided by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a nice toy", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words rolling around in their mouths like hard candy". Kraus writes Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was destined to be disappointed when I hoped this fresh tone could last out the book. The author states here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she shares with her hero Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her past books reasserts itself in the central part. The protagonist is working on refurbishing three dozen dilapidated units in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a world propelled by the hostility and dread that drives an electoral success. A significant portion discusses about Catt's social media ostracism on social media, her listed profession modified from "writer" to "landlord" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she says that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn something about an the United States that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would overlook entirely".
The Homicide Account
Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the referenced day experienced by the deceased with the perpetrator and his associates. The author possesses great source material, and details moment by moment what transpired when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, loitering fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being shot by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.
Fascination and Incompletion
The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and reckless transgression tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partly through the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par
