🔗 Share this article

The new book is populated with characters chasing after clean slates, struggling to escape substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into conflict. The author frequently uses the phrase "fresh start", making it willfully cynical through recurring use. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the narrative. Meanwhile, the author herself seems to be making her personal new beginning, as this seems a novel form of writing – observational, authentically narrative. However it reveals itself to be laden with the recurring issues and approaches as earlier books.

From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic

The writer started out as an creative who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting intimate women's literature from abjection into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the following three engaging and challenging novels lacked the impact and rawness that the letter form infused into the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a renegade artist who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It makes sense that she currently desires to try out new kinds of material, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a period in which she claims that contemporary political climate turns intimate literature redundant.

Three Generations, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, spanning several time periods – all unable to escape their pasts. The book includes the story of Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, transitioning from the New York borough to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one directionless individual by another in a community long abandoned by progressive politics only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.

As a reader fond of honed writing of the kind the author herself often avoids, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the opening part.

As someone who reads who appreciates honed writing of the style that Kraus usually avoids, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. There is a fresh level of observation that accommodates minutiae, like the bucket that the young Catt frees from the ice at the start of the story, aided by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a nice toy", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". She tells the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was destined to be disappointed when I hoped this new voice could last out the book. Kraus says here that she resents the pleasure readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her idol author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works reasserts itself in the second segment. Catt Greene is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between two different states, unable to aid Paul control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a world driven by the anger and fear that underpins an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on a platform, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "property owner" on a reference site. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she states that she's looking into the killing so that before leaving Minnesota, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even see".

The Homicide Account

So then we come to the actual killing – and the referenced day experienced by the deceased with the killer and his associates. Kraus utilizes excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what transpired when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, loitering fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by Brittney's partner Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman spiraling out of control in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par