The new book features individuals chasing after clean slates, trying to break free from addictions or toxic relationships, only to see hope turn into aggression. Kraus frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", making it willfully cynical through recurring use. Examples include "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the story. Meanwhile, the author herself seems to be making her personal new beginning, since this appears a novel form of writing – observational, truly literary. But then it reveals itself to be laden with the recurring issues and approaches as her previous works.
From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic
The writer started out as an visual artist who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, transforming personal female narrative from humiliation into assassination. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the power and directness that the letter form imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a nonconformist creator who had become a major property owner, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It is logical that she now wants to try out different types of content, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a time when she asserts that Trumpian politics makes confessional writing redundant.
Several Eras, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning three generations – all unable to escape their pasts. There is the story of characters Emma and Jasper, versions of Kraus's parents, relocating from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. There is the account of Kraus, in the character of Catt Greene, confronting the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a locality long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.
From my perspective as a reader fond of polished prose of the kind the author herself tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the first section.
Being a reader who favors precise prose of the variety that the author often disregards, I was won over by the novelistic voice of the first section. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that makes room for minutiae, like the container that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the opening of the book, aided by her cherished parent. "I found an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a nice toy", he answers, "the nuanced interpretations of terms rolling around in their mouths like hard candy". Kraus writes the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not entirely her own."
Frustration and Disruption
I was fated to feel let down when I wished this fresh tone could continue through the novel. The author states here that she resents the satisfaction readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her past books reasserts itself in the second segment. Catt Greene is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while shuttling between two different states, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a environment propelled by the anger and fear that powers a political win. A significant portion discusses about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she states that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even perceive".
The Killing Story
So then we come to the homicide in question – and the titular day experienced by the deceased with the killer and his companions. Kraus has great source material, and reconstructs step by step what occurred as Brandon came to visit Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, loitering getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to go further into her personal fixations here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who gains dimension partly through Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl spiraling out of control in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the point that her narrative ends almost mid-par
