🔗 Share this article

The Four Spent the Day Together features individuals pursuing fresh starts, struggling to escape substance abuse or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into conflict. Kraus often employs the phrase "new beginning", rendering it willfully cynical through recurring use. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the story. And yet, Kraus herself appears to be undertaking her personal new beginning, since this presents as a different type of work – documentarian, truly literary. However it proves to be filled with the same dilemmas and styles as earlier books.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

Kraus started out as an visual artist who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming intimate women's literature from abjection into defiance. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the impact and rawness that the correspondence format infused into the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a renegade artist who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It is logical that she now wants to experiment with new kinds of material, looking outwards to external narratives, at a time when she claims that contemporary political climate turns intimate literature obsolete.

Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, spanning several time periods – none able to break free from their histories. There is the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, transitioning from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. Then there is the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. Finally the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a community long abandoned by progressive politics only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in rural Minnesota.

For this reader drawn to honed writing of the type Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the first section.

As a reader who favors crafted language of the variety that Kraus herself often disregards, I was captivated by the literary tone of the first section. There is a fresh level of observation that allows space for minutiae, like the bucket that the young Catt dislodges from ice at the opening of the book, aided by her adored dad. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". She tells Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this different style could persist to the end. The author states here that she resents the enjoyment readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the unpolished style she has in common with her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works reasserts itself in the middle section. Catt is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between Minnesota and LA, unable to aid her husband control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a environment driven by the hostility and dread that underpins Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "real estate holder" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. On one occasion she states that she's looking into the killing so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn something about an America that her social media opponents would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".

The Homicide Account

So then we come to the actual killing – and the referenced day spent by the murdered individual with the killer and his friends. The author possesses excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but seems affably to have spent the day with her companions, mooching around fixing his automobile and funding treats and narcotics, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for aggressive outbursts.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards responsible documentation and reckless transgression tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who gains dimension in part due to the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par