The new book is populated with protagonists seeking fresh starts, struggling to escape drugs or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into conflict. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", making it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the narrative. At the same time, Kraus herself is embarking on her own fresh start, since this seems a new kind of book – fact-based, truly literary. But then it reveals itself to be filled with the familiar conflicts and approaches as past novels.
From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work
Kraus started out as an creative who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, converting personal female narrative from abjection into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the following three compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a renegade artist who had evolved into a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It is logical that she now wants to experiment with fresh narrative sources, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a period in which she asserts that contemporary political climate turns intimate literature redundant.
Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing several time periods – none able to break free from their pasts. We encounter the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, relocating from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband a man named Paul. Finally the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a locality largely deserted by progressive politics only 80 miles from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.
As a reader drawn to refined literature of the type Kraus often avoids, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the opening part.
As someone who reads who appreciates precise prose of the style that the author tends to eschew, I was seduced by the literary tone of the opening segment. There is a novel degree of detail that makes room for small details, like the container that the young Catt dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like piece candy". The author narrates the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."
Frustration and Disruption
I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this fresh tone could last out the book. The author states here that she is annoyed by the satisfaction readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the unpolished style she shares with her hero author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books reasserts itself in the second segment. The protagonist is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between two different states, unable to aid Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a world fueled by the rage and anxiety that underpins Trump's victory. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on social media, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. In a moment she states that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she could potentially understand something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would fail to comprehend, would not even see".
The Killing Story
So then we come to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day spent by the deceased with the murderer and his friends. Kraus utilizes excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after connecting via an application where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, loitering having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for aggressive outbursts.
Obsession and Unfinished Business
The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and reckless transgression clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her personal fixations here. The standout figure is Brittney, who comes alive in part due to the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
