🔗 Share this article

The Four Spent the Day Together centers on individuals chasing after fresh starts, attempting to leave behind drugs or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into conflict. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", rendering it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the text. Meanwhile, Kraus herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, since this seems a new kind of book – observational, genuinely novelistic. Yet it proves to be filled with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as her previous works.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

Kraus was originally an visual artist who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating intimate women's literature from humiliation into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the power and directness that the correspondence format infused into the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her role as a renegade artist who had become a major property owner, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It is logical that she presently aims to try out new kinds of material, directing her gaze to the experiences of others, at a moment when she claims that current political era makes confessional writing obsolete.

Several Eras, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering multiple eras – all unable to escape their pasts. There is the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, representations of Kraus's parents, transitioning from the New York borough to the Connecticut countryside. Additionally the account of Kraus, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband her husband Paul. Finally the story of the murder of one troubled youth by another in a community long abandoned by progressive politics only a short distance from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader attracted to honed writing of the sort Kraus often avoids, I was seduced by the narrative style of the first section.

Being a reader who appreciates honed writing of the variety that Kraus tends to eschew, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the first section. There is a fresh level of observation that allows space for minutiae, like the pail that the young Catt dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a nice toy", he answers, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like piece candy". The author narrates the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."

Frustration and Disruption

I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this different style could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the pleasure readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the unpolished style she has in common with her hero Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her past books comes back in the middle section. Catt is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between two different states, failing to help Paul manage his alcohol use. She experiences powerlessness as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a society driven by the hostility and dread that drives an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "landlord" on a reference site. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. On one occasion she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her social media opponents would not understand, would not even see".

The Homicide Account

Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the titular day experienced by the victim with the killer and his companions. Kraus has compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what happened when Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He sought a sexual encounter but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, mooching around having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by Brittney's partner Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt develops an obsession by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. However, I would have preferred her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who comes alive partly through Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that Catt converses 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