🔗 Share this article

The Four Spent the Day Together centers on characters pursuing new beginnings, attempting to leave behind substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into violence. The author frequently uses the phrase "fresh start", rendering it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" recur in the text. Meanwhile, the author herself is embarking on her personal new beginning, as this appears a new kind of book – documentarian, authentically narrative. However it turns out to be packed with the familiar conflicts and approaches as past novels.

From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book

Kraus was originally an visual artist who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as epistles to an unresponsive love interest, transforming confessional female writing from humiliation into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the following three engaging and challenging novels did not possess the impact and rawness that the correspondence format infused into the voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a maverick maker who had become a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It is logical that she now wants to try out different types of content, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a time when she states that current political era makes confessional writing unnecessary.

Three Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, encompassing several time periods – all unable to escape their backgrounds. The book includes the story of characters Emma and Jasper, representations of Kraus's parents, relocating from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. There is the narrative of the author, in the guise of Catt Greene, confronting the late recognition of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a community long abandoned by liberal ideals only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.

From my perspective as a reader attracted to honed writing of the type Kraus herself typically rejects, I was seduced by the literary tone of the opening part.

As someone who reads drawn to crafted language of the kind that the author usually avoids, I was seduced by the literary tone of the initial part. It possesses a novel degree of detail that makes room for small details, like the pail that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, assisted by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a great plaything", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language rolling around in their mouths like hard candy". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not entirely her own."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this fresh tone could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she resents the pleasure audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to disruption, to the unpolished style she shares with her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works reasserts itself in the middle section. The protagonist is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid Paul control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a society propelled by the hostility and dread that powers a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "landlord" on the online encyclopedia. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. In a moment she states that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she could potentially understand something about an America that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".

The Killing Story

So then we come to the murder itself – and the titular day experienced by the deceased with the killer and his friends. Kraus has compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He sought a sexual encounter but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, mooching around fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I found myself captivated by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who gains dimension in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par