🔗 Share this article

This latest work is populated with protagonists chasing after new beginnings, struggling to escape drugs or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into violence. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the text. And yet, Kraus herself is embarking on her own fresh start, since this appears a new kind of book – documentarian, authentically narrative. Yet it proves to be filled with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as past novels.

From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book

Kraus began as an visual artist who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, structured as missives to a distant beloved, elevating intimate women's literature from self-debasement into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels missed the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style brought to the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her role as a nonconformist creator who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on housing investments. It follows that she currently desires to explore fresh narrative sources, turning outward to other people's stories, at a moment when she claims that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing redundant.

Multiple Generations, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, encompassing three generations – none able to break free from their backgrounds. The book includes the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, versions of the author's parents, relocating from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. The third thread involves the story of the murder of one troubled youth by another in a locality mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.

For this reader attracted to refined literature of the kind Kraus herself often avoids, I was captivated by the narrative style of the first section.

As someone who reads who appreciates crafted language of the style that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was won over by the literary tone of the opening segment. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for minutiae, like the container that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her adored dad. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like sweet treats". Kraus writes Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was destined to be disappointed when I wished this fresh tone could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she resents the satisfaction those who appreciate polished prose have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her hero author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her past books reasserts itself in the middle section. Catt is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between two different states, unsuccessful in assisting her husband control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as Paul moves between poorly supported positions as an recovery specialist in a environment propelled by the rage and anxiety that underpins an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she remarks that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her online critics would not understand, would not even perceive".

The Murder Narrative

Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the titular day passed by the deceased with the perpetrator and his companions. Kraus has great source material, and reconstructs step by step what occurred as a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He sought a sexual encounter but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, mooching around getting his car mended and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

Catt develops an obsession by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who comes alive partially because of Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par