The new book centers on protagonists pursuing fresh starts, trying to break free from drugs or toxic relationships, only to see hope turn into violence. The author frequently uses the phrase "new beginning", rendering it deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the story. And yet, Kraus herself is embarking on her individual reinvention, because this appears a different type of work – fact-based, truly literary. However it proves to be filled with the familiar conflicts and styles as her previous works.
From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work
The writer was originally an artist who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, converting intimate women's literature from self-debasement into rebellion. She continued writing, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels missed the power and directness that the correspondence format brought to the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a renegade artist who had turned into a extensive real estate holder, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It makes sense that she currently desires to explore different types of content, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a time when she states that current political era makes confessional writing redundant.
Multiple Generations, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering several time periods – none able to break free from their histories. The book includes the story of Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, moving from the urban environment to a pastoral setting. There is the narrative of the author, in the persona of Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. The third thread involves the story of the murder of one directionless individual by another in a locality largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.
As a reader attracted to polished prose of the sort the author herself typically rejects, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the opening part.
As someone who reads drawn to crafted language of the variety that the author tends to eschew, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the initial part. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates small details, like the container that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the opening of the book, helped by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a nice toy", he replies, "the nuanced interpretations of terms tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". Kraus writes the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was fated to feel let down when I expected this different style could last out the book. Kraus says here that she resents the pleasure audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works reasserts itself in the middle section. The protagonist is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting Paul manage his alcohol use. She experiences powerlessness as Paul transitions between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a society driven by the hostility and dread that underpins Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "real estate holder" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. At one point she remarks that she's investigating the murder so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would fail to comprehend, would not even see".
The Homicide Account
Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the referenced day spent by the victim with the perpetrator and his associates. The author possesses excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what happened when a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she offered adult photos. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, loitering fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for aggressive outbursts.
Obsession and Unfinished Business
Catt develops an obsession by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and reckless transgression clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partially because of Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
