This latest work centers on individuals seeking fresh starts, attempting to leave behind addictions or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. The author often employs the phrase "fresh start", rendering it deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They chose to begin anew" appear throughout the text. At the same time, she seems to be making her individual reinvention, as this seems a different type of work – fact-based, truly literary. But then it proves to be laden with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as past novels.
From Chance Novelist to Iconic Work
Kraus was originally an artist who entered the literary world somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, converting confessional female writing from humiliation into defiance. She continued writing, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels lacked the impact and rawness that the epistolary style imparted to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a maverick maker who had become a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It makes sense that she presently aims to try out new kinds of material, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a time when she states that current political era makes confessional writing obsolete.
Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering three generations – none able to break free from their histories. There is the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, representations of Kraus's parents, relocating from the New York borough to the Connecticut countryside. There is the account of Kraus, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a locality mostly forsaken by progressive politics only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader attracted to refined literature of the sort the author herself typically rejects, I was captivated by the narrative style of the first section.
Being a reader drawn to honed writing of the kind that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was captivated by the literary tone of the opening segment. There is a fresh level of observation that makes room for small details, like the container that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, helped by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was fated to feel let down when I expected this fresh tone could continue through the novel. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the satisfaction those who appreciate polished prose have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her hero Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works returns in the middle section. The protagonist is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between two different states, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a environment fueled by the anger and fear that powers an electoral success. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on social media, her listed profession modified from "author" to "property owner" on a reference site. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she says that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an America that her social media opponents would be unable to grasp, would overlook entirely".
The Killing Story
So then we come to the actual killing – and the referenced day spent by the deceased with the killer and his friends. The author possesses great source material, and knows hour by hour what transpired when Brandon came to visit Brittney after connecting via an application where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day with her companions, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.
Fascination and Incompletion
The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who becomes vivid partially because of the protagonist's connection to her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par
