🔗 Share this article

This latest work is populated with individuals seeking new beginnings, struggling to escape addictions or harmful partnerships, only to see hope turn into violence. Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into willfully cynical through recurring use. Phrases such as "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the text. And yet, Kraus herself seems to be making her personal new beginning, as this presents as a new kind of book – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. However it turns out to be laden with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as earlier books.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

Kraus started out as an creative who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating intimate women's literature from humiliation into defiance. She kept producing books, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels lacked the power and directness that the epistolary style brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a maverick maker who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on real estate deals. It follows that she now wants to try out new kinds of material, turning outward to other people's stories, at a time when she claims that current political era turns intimate literature unnecessary.

Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering several time periods – all unable to escape their histories. There is the story of characters Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, moving from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. There is the account of Kraus, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a town largely deserted by progressive politics only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.

As a reader attracted to polished prose of the sort Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the opening part.

As someone who reads who favors crafted language of the kind that Kraus usually avoids, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the initial part. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for small details, like the bucket that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the start of the story, aided by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she exclaims; "a nice toy", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". The author narrates Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not entirely her own."

Frustration and Disruption

I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this different style 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 committed to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her inspiration Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her past books comes back in the middle section. The protagonist is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul cycles through underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a environment driven by the anger and fear that drives a political win. A significant portion discusses about Catt's social media ostracism on social media, her listed profession modified from "writer" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. At one point 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 Twitter detractors would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".

The Killing Story

Thus we arrive to the homicide in question – and the referenced day spent by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his associates. Kraus utilizes compelling foundational content, and details moment by moment what happened when the victim 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 in the company of her associates, loitering fixing his automobile and funding treats and narcotics, before being murdered by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for aggressive outbursts.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who comes alive in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par