The Four Spent the Day Together features protagonists pursuing new beginnings, trying to break free from substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into violence. The author often employs the phrase "new beginning", rendering it deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the narrative. And yet, she appears to be undertaking her individual reinvention, since this appears a different type of work – documentarian, authentically narrative. However it proves to be laden with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as her previous works.
From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book
The writer started out as an visual artist who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting confessional female writing from abjection into assassination. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the impact and rawness that the correspondence format imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her role as a nonconformist creator who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It makes sense that she now wants to try out new kinds of material, turning outward to the experiences of others, at a period in which she claims 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, spanning multiple eras – all unable to escape their pasts. We encounter the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, transitioning from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the character of Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a community long abandoned by progressive politics only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.
For this reader attracted to refined literature of the kind Kraus herself typically rejects, I was seduced by the literary tone of the initial segment.
As someone who reads who favors precise prose of the kind that Kraus usually avoids, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the initial part. It possesses a fresh level of observation that makes room for trivial aspects, like the pail that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the start of the story, assisted by her cherished parent. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like sweet treats". The author narrates Emma's narrative with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not entirely her own."
Frustration and Disruption
I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this fresh tone could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the unpolished style she shares with her hero author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels reasserts itself in the middle section. Catt Greene is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while moving between Minnesota and LA, failing to help Paul manage his alcohol use. She experiences powerlessness as Paul transitions between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a environment propelled by the anger and fear that underpins a political win. A significant portion discusses about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her listed profession modified from "author" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she says that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an the nation that her online critics would not understand, would overlook entirely".
The Killing Story
Thus we arrive to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day experienced by the deceased with the killer and his friends. Kraus utilizes compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what happened when a man named Brandon came to visit 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, mooching around fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by her romantic interest Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.
Obsession and Unfinished Business
Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who comes alive partly through Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par
