This latest work is populated with protagonists chasing after fresh starts, attempting to leave behind addictions or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into conflict. Kraus frequently uses the phrase "fresh start", making it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Examples include "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the text. Meanwhile, she seems to be making her individual reinvention, as this seems a new kind of book – fact-based, truly literary. Yet it reveals itself to be laden with the recurring issues and approaches as earlier books.
From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic
The writer was originally an creative who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, converting intimate women's literature from humiliation into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the following three fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format imparted to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her position as a renegade artist who had evolved into a extensive real estate holder, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It makes sense that she presently aims to try out fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to external narratives, at a moment when she states that Trumpian politics makes confessional writing unnecessary.
Several Eras, One Unescapable Past
The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, spanning multiple eras – none able to break free from their histories. The book includes the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, transitioning from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. There is the narrative of the author, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a locality mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.
From my perspective as a reader fond of refined literature of the kind Kraus often avoids, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the first section.
As someone who reads who favors crafted language of the kind that Kraus often disregards, I was captivated by the literary tone of the initial part. There is a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates minutiae, like the container that the young Catt frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he answers, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". The author narrates Emma's narrative with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."
Disappointment and Disjunction
I was fated to feel let down when I hoped this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she dislikes the enjoyment readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disruption, to the unpolished style she has in common with her hero author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works comes back in the second segment. Catt is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between two different states, unsuccessful in assisting Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as her spouse moves between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a society fueled by the rage and anxiety that drives Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her occupation changed from "author" to "landlord" on a reference site. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she states that she's investigating the murder so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an the nation that her online critics would not understand, would not even perceive".
The Killing Story
So then we come to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day spent by the victim with the perpetrator and his friends. The author possesses great source material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day in the company of her associates, wandering about fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.
Preoccupation and Open Ends
Catt develops an obsession by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who gains dimension in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par
