The Four Spent the Day Together features individuals chasing after clean slates, struggling to escape drugs or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into conflict. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", making it deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the text. At the same time, the author herself is embarking on her individual reinvention, as this presents as a new kind of book – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. However it reveals itself to be laden with the familiar conflicts and approaches as past novels.
From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic
The writer began as an creative who became a writer unintentionally 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 rebellion. She continued writing, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a maverick maker who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It makes sense that she now wants to experiment with different types of content, directing her gaze to the experiences of others, at a time when she asserts that contemporary political climate turns intimate literature redundant.
Several Eras, Shared Inescapable History
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, spanning several time periods – all unable to escape their histories. The book includes the tale of characters Emma and Jasper, versions of the author's parents, transitioning from the New York borough to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the character of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a town mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.
From my perspective as a reader fond of polished prose of the sort the author herself tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the first section.
Being a reader drawn to honed writing of the style that the author usually avoids, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. It possesses a novel degree of detail that accommodates trivial aspects, like the bucket that the young Catt dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a great plaything", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". She tells the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was fated to feel let down when I wished this fresh tone could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the satisfaction those who appreciate polished prose have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her hero author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her past books comes back in the middle section. Catt Greene is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between two different states, failing to help her husband curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as Paul cycles through poorly supported positions as an addiction therapist in a world driven by the hostility and dread that underpins a political win. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on a platform, her listed profession modified from "writer" to "real estate holder" on a reference site. She still gives the impression 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 America that her Twitter detractors would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".
The Killing Story
Then we reach to the actual killing – and the referenced day spent by the victim with the killer and his companions. The author possesses excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day with her companions, wandering about getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.
Obsession and Unfinished Business
The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to explore more thoroughly her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who comes alive partly through Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl spiraling out of control in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par
