🔗 Share this article

This latest work is populated with protagonists pursuing fresh starts, struggling to escape drugs or harmful partnerships, only to witness hope devolve into conflict. The author often employs the phrase "fresh start", transforming it into deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They opted for a clean break" are scattered across the text. And yet, she is embarking on her personal new beginning, since this seems a new kind of book – fact-based, authentically narrative. However it turns out to be laden with the familiar conflicts and styles as earlier books.

From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic

The writer started out as an creative who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming intimate women's literature from abjection into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels lacked the impact and rawness that the epistolary style brought to the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a nonconformist creator who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on real estate deals. It follows that she currently desires to explore fresh narrative sources, directing her gaze to the experiences of others, at a moment when she asserts that current political era turns intimate literature redundant.

Multiple Generations, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, encompassing multiple eras – each trapped by their histories. We encounter the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, versions of the author's parents, relocating from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one directionless individual by another in a community largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.

For this reader fond of honed writing of the type Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the literary tone of the initial segment.

As someone who reads drawn to precise prose of the variety that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was won over by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for minutiae, like the bucket that the young Catt dislodges from ice at the opening of the book, assisted by her adored dad. "I found an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the nuanced interpretations of terms tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". She tells Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."

Frustration and Disruption

I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this different style could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the pleasure those who appreciate polished prose have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to disruption, to the unpolished style she shares with her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels returns in the second segment. Catt Greene is attempting to do up multiple decrepit residences in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul moves between underfunded jobs as an substance abuse counselor in a environment driven by the rage and anxiety that underpins a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her occupation changed from "writer" to "landlord" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. At one point she states that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an the United States that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even perceive".

The Killing Story

Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the referenced day experienced by the victim with the perpetrator and his friends. Kraus has great source material, and knows hour by hour what happened when Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, mooching around getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being shot by her romantic interest Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I found myself captivated by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and reckless transgression tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who gains dimension in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the point that her narrative ends almost mid-par