🔗 Share this article

The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with characters pursuing new beginnings, struggling to escape drugs or toxic relationships, only to witness hope devolve into conflict. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into deliberately jaded through recurring use. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the story. At the same time, the author herself seems to be making her personal new beginning, since this seems a different type of work – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. However it proves to be laden with the same dilemmas and approaches as earlier books.

From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book

The writer began as an artist who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, transforming confessional female writing from abjection into defiance. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels lacked the impact and rawness that the epistolary style infused into the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a maverick maker who had evolved into a major property owner, so there was significant attention on housing investments. It follows that she now wants to experiment with fresh narrative sources, turning outward to external narratives, at a period in which she asserts that Trumpian politics renders personal narrative redundant.

Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering several time periods – each trapped by their backgrounds. We encounter the story of Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, moving from the New York borough to the Connecticut countryside. There is the narrative of the author, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. Finally the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a town largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.

From my perspective as a reader attracted to honed writing of the kind the author herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the literary tone of the opening part.

Being a reader who appreciates precise prose of the variety that the author usually avoids, I was won over by the literary tone of the opening segment. It exhibits a fresh level of observation that allows space for trivial aspects, like the bucket that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a nice toy", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". The author narrates Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this different style could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the satisfaction audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her idol Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her past books returns in the second segment. Catt is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while moving between two different states, unable to aid Paul control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a environment propelled by the hostility and dread that underpins an electoral success. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on social media, her listed profession modified from "writer" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she says that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her social media opponents would fail to comprehend, would not even perceive".

The Homicide Account

Thus we arrive to the actual killing – and the eponymous day passed by the victim with the murderer and his friends. Kraus has great source material, and details moment by moment what occurred as a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, loitering having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has repeatedly received inpatient care for aggressive outbursts.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her own obsessions here. The standout figure is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partly through Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the point that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par