The Four Spent the Day Together centers on characters pursuing fresh starts, struggling to escape drugs or harmful partnerships, only to see hope turn into aggression. The author frequently uses the phrase "new beginning", transforming it into willfully cynical through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the story. At the same time, she seems to be making her individual reinvention, because this seems a novel form of writing – documentarian, authentically narrative. However it proves to be laden with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as her previous works.
From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic
The writer began as an artist who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, converting intimate women's literature from abjection into rebellion. She continued writing, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a renegade artist who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It is logical that she now wants to experiment with different types of content, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a time when she claims that current political era makes confessional writing unnecessary.
Several Eras, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning several time periods – all unable to escape their pasts. The book includes the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, representations of Kraus's parents, moving from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. Then there is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her partner struggling with addiction her husband Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a town long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.
As a reader attracted to honed writing of the type the author herself typically rejects, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.
As a reader drawn to honed writing of the style that the author often disregards, I was captivated by the literary tone of the initial part. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that allows space for minutiae, like the container that the young Catt dislodges from ice at the start of the story, aided by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a great plaything", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". Kraus writes Emma's story with interest and closeness. "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. The author states here that she dislikes the enjoyment those who appreciate polished prose have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her idol Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works reasserts itself in the middle section. Catt Greene is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting her husband control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a world fueled by the anger and fear that powers an electoral success. A significant portion discusses about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "author" to "landlord" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to be overly concerned about this. At one point she says that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she could potentially understand something about an America that her Twitter detractors would fail to comprehend, would not even see".
The Killing Story
Then we reach 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 happened when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after connecting via an application where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, mooching around getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.
Fascination and Incompletion
The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and daring boundary-pushing clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
