This latest work features individuals pursuing fresh starts, attempting to leave behind addictions or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into aggression. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into willfully cynical through recurring use. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They opted for a clean break" recur in the story. Meanwhile, Kraus herself seems to be making her personal new beginning, as this seems a different type of work – observational, truly literary. Yet it turns out to be laden with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as past novels.
From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic
Kraus began as an creative who transitioned to writing unintentionally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting personal female narrative from humiliation into assassination. She kept producing books, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style 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 extensive real estate holder, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It makes sense that she now wants to try out different types of content, looking outwards to external narratives, at a moment when she states that current political era turns intimate literature unnecessary.
Three Generations, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning three generations – all unable to escape their pasts. We encounter the story of characters Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, transitioning from the Bronx to a pastoral setting. Then there is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband a man named Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a locality mostly forsaken by liberal ideals only a short distance from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.
As a reader drawn to refined literature of the sort Kraus typically rejects, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the first section.
As a reader drawn to crafted language of the variety that Kraus often disregards, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the initial part. It exhibits a fresh level of observation that makes room for minutiae, like the pail that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a nice toy", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". Kraus writes the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not entirely her own."
Frustration and Disruption
I was fated to feel let down when I expected this fresh tone could continue through the novel. The author states here that she resents the satisfaction readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the unpolished style she has in common with her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels returns in the second segment. Catt Greene is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between two different states, failing to help Paul control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul moves between underfunded jobs as an substance abuse counselor in a world driven by the rage and anxiety that powers an electoral success. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her occupation changed from "novelist" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. In a moment she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would fail to comprehend, would not even perceive".
The Homicide Account
Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the titular day experienced by the victim with the perpetrator and his companions. Kraus utilizes great source material, and knows hour by hour what transpired when Brandon came to visit Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He sought a sexual encounter but seems affably to have spent the day in the company of her associates, mooching around having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt develops an obsession by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who comes alive partly through Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par
