🔗 Share this article

This latest work centers on protagonists seeking clean slates, struggling to escape drugs or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into violence. The author often employs the phrase "new beginning", making it deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the story. At the same time, she appears to be undertaking her personal new beginning, as this appears a novel form of writing – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. But then it proves to be packed with the familiar conflicts and styles as past novels.

From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic

The writer started out as an artist who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting personal female narrative from abjection into assassination. She kept producing books, but the following three engaging and challenging novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style brought to the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a maverick maker who had turned into a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It is logical that she currently desires to explore new kinds of material, looking outwards to external narratives, at a moment when she asserts that current political era turns intimate literature unnecessary.

Several Eras, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, spanning several time periods – none able to break free from their histories. There is the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, relocating from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the guise of protagonist Catt Greene, confronting the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a community long abandoned by liberal ideals only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.

For this reader fond of polished prose of the kind Kraus herself typically rejects, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the first section.

As a reader drawn to crafted language of the kind that the author usually avoids, I was won over by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. It possesses a fresh level of observation that makes room for minutiae, like the pail that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, helped by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a great plaything", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". Kraus writes the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not entirely her own."

Frustration and Disruption

I was fated to feel let down when I hoped this new voice could continue through the novel. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the satisfaction readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her idol author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her earlier works comes back in the middle section. The protagonist is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between Minnesota and LA, unable to aid Paul curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as her spouse transitions between low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a environment propelled by the rage and anxiety that powers an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "landlord" on a reference site. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she states that she's looking into the killing so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would be unable to grasp, would not even see".

The Homicide Account

Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the referenced day passed by the deceased with the murderer and his companions. Kraus has great source material, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by Brittney's partner Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who gains dimension partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par