🔗 Share this article

This latest work features individuals seeking fresh starts, attempting to leave behind substance abuse or harmful partnerships, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. Kraus frequently uses the phrase "fresh start", rendering it intentionally weary through its repetitions. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" appear throughout the narrative. At the same time, she is embarking on her own fresh start, because this presents as a new kind of book – fact-based, truly literary. Yet it turns out to be packed with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as earlier books.

From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book

The writer started out as an artist who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating confessional female writing from abjection into assassination. She continued writing, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the impact and rawness that the letter form infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her role as a nonconformist creator who had evolved into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It is logical that she currently desires to try out new kinds of material, looking outwards to external narratives, at a moment when she states that Trumpian politics makes confessional writing unnecessary.

Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing several time periods – all unable to escape their histories. We encounter the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, versions of Kraus's parents, moving from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. There is the narrative of the author, in the persona of Catt Greene, grappling with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a community mostly forsaken by progressive politics only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in a remote part of Minnesota.

For this reader attracted to honed writing of the kind the author herself often avoids, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the first section.

As a reader drawn to honed writing of the kind that Kraus usually avoids, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the initial part. There is a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates minutiae, like the container that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, aided by her cherished parent. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he answers, "the elliptical meanings of words rolling around in their mouths like hard candy". She tells Emma's narrative with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she dislikes the pleasure audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her earlier works returns in the second segment. Catt Greene is working on refurbishing multiple decrepit residences in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid Paul control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through underfunded jobs as an substance abuse counselor in a society driven by the rage and anxiety that drives a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "landlord" on a reference site. The author still appears 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 might be able to learn something about an America that her Twitter detractors would fail to comprehend, would not even see".

The Killing Story

Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the referenced day passed by the victim with the killer and his friends. Kraus has compelling foundational content, and knows hour by hour what transpired when the victim Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, wandering about getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

Catt develops an obsession by the narrative, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to go further into her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid in part due to the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par