🔗 Share this article

The new book is populated with protagonists chasing after fresh starts, attempting to leave behind substance abuse or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into violence. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", rendering it intentionally weary through constant reiteration. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the text. And yet, the author herself appears to be undertaking her own fresh start, since this appears a different type of work – fact-based, truly literary. However it reveals itself to be laden with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as past novels.

From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book

The writer was originally an artist who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, structured as epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting personal female narrative from abjection into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format infused into the voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a renegade artist who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It is logical that she presently aims to experiment with new kinds of material, turning outward to other people's stories, at a moment when she claims that Trumpian politics makes confessional writing redundant.

Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing multiple eras – each trapped by their backgrounds. We encounter the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, moving from the urban environment to a pastoral setting. There is the account of Kraus, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. Finally the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a town largely deserted by progressive politics only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.

For this reader drawn to refined literature of the sort the author herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the literary tone of the opening part.

As someone who reads drawn to precise prose of the kind that Kraus often disregards, I was won over by the literary tone of the opening segment. It possesses a novel degree of detail that makes room for trivial aspects, like the container that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the start of the story, helped by her cherished parent. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a nice toy", he answers, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like piece candy". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was fated to feel let down when I expected this different style could last out the book. Kraus says here that she dislikes the pleasure audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disruption, to the unpolished style she echoes from her hero author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels reasserts itself in the central part. Catt Greene is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help her husband control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as Paul cycles through poorly supported positions as an addiction therapist in a environment driven by the rage and anxiety that drives an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. On one occasion she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she could potentially understand something about an the nation that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even see".

The Killing Story

So then we come to the actual killing – and the referenced day passed by the murdered individual with the murderer and his companions. The author possesses excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what transpired when a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, mooching around having his vehicle repaired and covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by Brittney's partner Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and reckless transgression clash in this segment. Yet I wished her to delve deeper into her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who gains dimension partly through the protagonist's connection to her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. This entire part feels oddly unfinished, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par