🔗 Share this article

This latest work is populated with characters pursuing new beginnings, trying to break free from drugs or harmful partnerships, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. The author frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into intentionally weary through constant reiteration. Phrases such as "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the text. At the same time, Kraus herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, as this appears a novel form of writing – documentarian, authentically narrative. But then it turns out to be filled with the familiar conflicts and approaches as past novels.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

The writer was originally an creative who entered the literary world somewhat by chance with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, structured as epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating intimate women's literature from abjection into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format imparted to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a renegade artist who had become a major property owner, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It follows that she now wants to experiment with fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to external narratives, at a period in which she claims that current political era renders personal narrative redundant.

Several Eras, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, encompassing three generations – all unable to escape their histories. The book includes the story of characters Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, relocating from the Bronx to a pastoral setting. There is the narrative of the author, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a community long abandoned by progressive politics only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader fond of refined literature of the kind Kraus tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the initial segment.

Being a reader drawn to honed writing of the style that Kraus herself often disregards, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the first section. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for small details, like the bucket that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the opening of the book, assisted by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a great plaything", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". Kraus writes Emma's story with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was fated to feel let down when I hoped this different style could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the satisfaction audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her hero author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels returns in the second segment. The protagonist is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help her husband curb his addiction. She feels helpless as her spouse cycles through low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a society driven by the anger and fear that underpins an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she states that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an America that her online critics would not understand, would overlook entirely".

The Killing Story

Thus we arrive to the actual killing – and the referenced day spent by the victim with the murderer and his companions. Kraus has great source material, and knows hour by hour what happened when Brandon came to visit Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day in the company of her associates, mooching around getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by Brittney's partner Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to go further into her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who gains dimension partly through Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. This entire part feels strangely incomplete, to the point that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par