🔗 Share this article

The new book is populated with characters chasing after clean slates, attempting to leave behind addictions or harmful partnerships, only to witness hope devolve into violence. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", rendering it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the narrative. And yet, the author herself is embarking on her own fresh start, because this appears 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 Iconic Work

The writer began as an visual artist who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming confessional female writing from humiliation into defiance. She kept producing books, but the following three fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her role as a renegade artist who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It is logical that she presently aims to explore different types of content, turning outward to other people's stories, at a period in which she states that Trumpian politics renders personal narrative obsolete.

Three Generations, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, encompassing several time periods – all unable to escape their backgrounds. We encounter the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, moving from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. There is the account of Kraus, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the late recognition of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one directionless individual by another in a community largely deserted by progressive politics only 80 miles from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader attracted to honed writing of the kind Kraus often avoids, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.

As a reader drawn to honed writing of the kind that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was won over by the literary tone of the first section. There is a novel degree of detail that allows space 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 found an ice toy!" she declares; "a great plaything", he answers, "the nuanced interpretations of terms rolling around in their mouths like sweet treats". She tells Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this new voice could persist to the end. The author states here that she dislikes the enjoyment those who appreciate polished prose have derived from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disruption, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works reasserts itself in the second segment. The protagonist is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through poorly supported positions as an recovery specialist in a environment propelled by the rage and anxiety that underpins Trump's victory. A significant portion discusses about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her occupation changed from "writer" to "property owner" on a reference site. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. In a moment she says that she's looking into the killing so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would be unable to grasp, would overlook entirely".

The Killing Story

Then we reach to the murder itself – and the titular day spent by the victim with the perpetrator and his associates. Kraus utilizes excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when Brandon came to meet 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, wandering about fixing his automobile and funding treats and narcotics, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has repeatedly received inpatient care for aggressive outbursts.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to go further into her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who becomes vivid partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par