🔗 Share this article

The new book centers on individuals chasing after fresh starts, trying to break free from substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into conflict. The author frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", making it deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He aimed to start over" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the narrative. Meanwhile, she appears to be undertaking her own fresh start, as this presents as a different type of work – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. Yet it reveals itself to be filled with the familiar conflicts and styles as her previous works.

From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic

The writer was originally an visual artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting confessional female writing from self-debasement into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the impact and rawness that the letter form infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a renegade artist who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It makes sense that she now wants to experiment with fresh narrative sources, turning outward to external narratives, at a period in which she claims that current political era turns intimate literature redundant.

Three Generations, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning three generations – all unable to escape their pasts. There is the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, transitioning from the New York borough to the Connecticut countryside. There is the narrative of the author, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one directionless individual by another in a community largely deserted by progressive politics only a short distance from Catt's cottage in a remote part of Minnesota.

As a reader fond of polished prose of the sort Kraus herself typically rejects, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.

As someone who reads drawn to precise prose of the style that the author usually avoids, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the initial part. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that allows space for small details, like the container that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, aided by her adored dad. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she exclaims; "a nice toy", he answers, "the nuanced interpretations of terms rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". The author narrates Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was destined to be disappointed when I wished this different style could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she resents the satisfaction audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she has in common with her idol Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels comes back in the central part. Catt Greene is attempting to do up multiple decrepit residences in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid her husband control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as her spouse moves between underfunded jobs as an substance abuse counselor in a society propelled by the hostility and dread that underpins Trump's victory. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. In a moment she says that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her social media opponents would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".

The Killing Story

Then we reach to the murder itself – and the eponymous day experienced by the deceased with the perpetrator and his associates. Kraus has excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He sought a sexual encounter but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, wandering about fixing his automobile and funding treats and narcotics, before being shot by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and reckless transgression clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to delve deeper into her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par