The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with protagonists pursuing clean slates, attempting to leave behind substance abuse or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into violence. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", making it intentionally weary through recurring use. Phrases such as "He aimed to start over" and "They chose to begin anew" appear throughout the text. At the same time, the author herself is embarking on her own fresh start, since this seems a different type of work – observational, genuinely novelistic. But then it proves to be laden with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as earlier books.
From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work
The writer started out as an creative who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, structured as missives to a distant beloved, elevating confessional female writing from humiliation into assassination. She continued writing, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the letter form infused into the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a renegade artist who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It makes sense that she currently desires to try out fresh narrative sources, turning outward to external narratives, at a period in which she states that current political era turns intimate literature redundant.
Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background
The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning multiple eras – none able to break free from their histories. We encounter the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, transitioning from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, confronting the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one directionless individual by another in a locality long abandoned by liberal ideals only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.
As a reader fond of polished prose of the kind the author herself tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the opening part.
As someone who reads who favors precise prose of the variety that Kraus herself often disregards, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the first section. It possesses a novel degree of detail that accommodates trivial aspects, like the pail that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the start of the story, helped by her adored dad. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a nice toy", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". Kraus writes Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."
Frustration and Disruption
I was fated to feel let down when I hoped this fresh tone could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she resents the pleasure audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her past books comes back in the middle section. Catt is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help her husband manage his alcohol use. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a environment driven by the rage and anxiety that underpins an electoral success. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her listed profession modified from "author" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she says that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her social media opponents would fail to comprehend, would not even see".
The Homicide Account
Then we reach to the actual killing – and the titular day passed by the murdered individual with the murderer and his associates. Kraus utilizes compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what occurred as Brandon came to meet Brittney after connecting via an application where she offered adult photos. He sought a sexual encounter but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, mooching around having his vehicle repaired and covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by her romantic interest Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.
Fascination and Incompletion
Catt develops an obsession by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who becomes vivid partially because of Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
