The Four Spent the Day Together features protagonists chasing after fresh starts, struggling to escape substance abuse or toxic relationships, only to see hope turn into conflict. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", rendering it deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the story. Meanwhile, the author herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, because this seems a new kind of book – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. However it turns out to be packed with the recurring issues and styles as earlier books.
From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book
The writer began as an visual artist who entered the literary world somewhat by chance with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting intimate women's literature from abjection into defiance. She continued writing, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the power and directness that the letter form brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her role as a nonconformist creator who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It makes sense that she now wants to experiment with different types of content, looking outwards to external narratives, at a moment when she claims that current political era renders personal narrative obsolete.
Several Eras, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing three generations – none able to break free from their histories. We encounter the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, moving from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a town long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's cottage in a remote part of Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader attracted to honed writing of the kind Kraus herself often avoids, I was seduced by the narrative style of the initial segment.
Being a reader drawn to honed writing of the variety that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the first section. It exhibits a fresh level of observation that allows space for minutiae, like the pail that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a great plaything", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like piece candy". She tells Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."
Letdown and Fragmentation
I was destined to be disappointed when I wished this different style could persist to the end. The author states here that she dislikes the pleasure audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her idol author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works returns in the second segment. Catt is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help her husband manage his alcohol use. She feels helpless as her spouse moves between poorly supported positions as an addiction therapist in a environment driven by the rage and anxiety that drives Trump's victory. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her occupation changed from "writer" to "real estate holder" on a reference site. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. In a moment she says that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an America that her social media opponents would fail to comprehend, would not even see".
The Killing Story
Then we reach to the actual killing – and the referenced day passed by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his companions. Kraus has great source material, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He sought a sexual encounter but seems amiably to have occupied the day with her companions, mooching around getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.
Fascination and Incompletion
The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who gains dimension partly through Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
