🔗 Share this article

The new book centers on characters chasing after clean slates, struggling to escape drugs or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into violence. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", making it willfully cynical through recurring use. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They opted for a clean break" recur in the narrative. And yet, Kraus herself seems to be making her personal new beginning, because this presents as a novel form of writing – observational, truly literary. Yet it proves to be laden with the recurring issues and styles as her previous works.

From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic

Kraus started out as an artist who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, structured as epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting personal female narrative from self-debasement into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the letter form imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a maverick maker who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on housing investments. It follows that she presently aims to try out new kinds of material, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a period in which she asserts that current political era turns intimate literature obsolete.

Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing several time periods – all unable to escape their backgrounds. The book includes the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, moving from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. Additionally the narrative of the author, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. The third thread involves the story of the murder of one directionless individual by another in a town mostly forsaken by liberal ideals only a short distance from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.

For this reader fond of honed writing of the kind the author herself typically rejects, I was seduced by the literary tone of the first section.

As someone who reads who favors precise prose of the style that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the first section. There is a novel degree of detail that allows space for trivial aspects, like the pail that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a great plaything", he answers, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like hard candy". The author narrates Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not entirely her own."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this different style could last out the book. The author states here that she dislikes the enjoyment audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works comes back in the second segment. The protagonist is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help her husband curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist 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 occupation changed from "author" to "property owner" on a reference site. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. At one point she remarks that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her social media opponents would fail to comprehend, would overlook entirely".

The Homicide Account

Thus we arrive to the actual killing – and the titular day experienced by the deceased with the murderer and his associates. The author possesses excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when the victim Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day with her companions, wandering about fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by Brittney's partner Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I found myself captivated by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The standout figure is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partly through Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the point that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par