🔗 Share this article

The new book is populated with individuals pursuing fresh starts, struggling to escape drugs or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. The author often employs the phrase "new beginning", making it deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" recur in the story. And yet, she is embarking on her own fresh start, since this presents as a novel form of writing – documentarian, authentically narrative. Yet it proves to be filled with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as earlier books.

From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work

The writer started out as an artist who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating intimate women's literature from humiliation into rebellion. She continued writing, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels missed the power and directness that the correspondence format brought to the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her position as a renegade artist who had turned into a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It follows that she currently desires to explore new kinds of material, turning outward to other people's stories, at a moment when she asserts that Trumpian politics makes confessional writing unnecessary.

Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning three generations – none able to break free from their pasts. The book includes the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, transitioning from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. There is the narrative of the author, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a town largely deserted by progressive politics only a short distance from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.

As a reader drawn to refined literature of the sort the author herself tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the first section.

As someone who reads who favors crafted language of the kind that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was captivated by the storytelling approach of the first section. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for minutiae, like the pail that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the opening of the book, aided by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like sweet treats". She tells Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not entirely her own."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this fresh tone could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she resents the enjoyment readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels reasserts itself in the middle section. Catt is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul manage his alcohol use. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a world fueled by the hostility and dread that underpins Trump's victory. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on social media, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she remarks that she's investigating the murder so that before exiting the region, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her social media opponents would be unable to grasp, would not even see".

The Murder Narrative

Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the titular day passed by the victim with the killer and his associates. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and details moment by moment what transpired when the victim Brandon came to see Brittney after connecting via an application where she sold sex pictures. He sought a sexual encounter but seems affably to have spent the day in the company of her associates, wandering about fixing his automobile and funding treats and narcotics, before being shot by Brittney's partner Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards ethical reporting and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partly through the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a struggling, neglected community. The author informs us that Catt speaks to Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels oddly unfinished, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par