The Four Spent the Day Together features characters pursuing fresh starts, attempting to leave behind drugs or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into conflict. Kraus often employs the phrase "fresh start", rendering it deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" recur in the text. Meanwhile, the author herself is embarking on her own fresh start, as this seems a new kind of book – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. However it proves to be filled with the familiar conflicts and styles as earlier books.
From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic
The writer was originally an creative who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating personal female narrative from humiliation into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels did not possess the power and directness that the epistolary style imparted to the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a maverick maker who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It is logical that she currently desires to explore fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to external narratives, at a moment when she claims that current political era makes confessional writing obsolete.
Several Eras, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing several time periods – all unable to escape their histories. We encounter the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, transitioning from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. Additionally the narrative of the author, in the character of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one directionless individual by another in a town mostly forsaken by liberal ideals only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.
As a reader fond of polished prose of the kind the author herself often avoids, I was captivated by the narrative style of the opening part.
As someone who reads who favors crafted language of the kind that Kraus usually avoids, I was captivated by the storytelling approach of the initial part. There is a novel degree of detail that accommodates minutiae, like the bucket that the young Catt frees from the ice at the opening of the book, aided by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like hard candy". The author narrates the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was fated to feel let down when I expected this different style could last out the book. The author states here that she resents the enjoyment readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her hero author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her earlier works returns in the second segment. Catt is working on refurbishing multiple decrepit residences in the city's most challenging districts while moving between two different states, failing to help Paul control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as her spouse moves between low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a world propelled by the anger and fear that underpins Trump's victory. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. On one occasion she says that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn something about an America that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even perceive".
The Homicide Account
Then we reach to the murder itself – and the titular day spent by the murdered individual with the killer and his companions. The author possesses excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what transpired when a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. 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 murdered by Brittney's partner Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The standout figure is Brittney, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels strangely incomplete, to the point that her narrative ends almost mid-par
