🔗 Share this article

The new book centers on characters pursuing clean slates, attempting to leave behind addictions or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into conflict. Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", making it deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They opted for a clean break" are scattered across the text. At the same time, Kraus herself is embarking on her individual reinvention, as this seems a different type of work – documentarian, truly literary. Yet it turns out to be filled with the familiar conflicts and styles as her previous works.

From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book

The writer began as an artist who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, structured as epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating confessional female writing from abjection into rebellion. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format infused into the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a nonconformist creator who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It follows that she presently aims to explore new kinds of material, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a time when she states that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature unnecessary.

Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing three generations – each trapped by their pasts. We encounter the tale of Emma and Jasper, versions of the author's parents, moving from the Bronx to a pastoral setting. Additionally the account of Kraus, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. Finally the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a community long abandoned by liberal ideals only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader attracted to polished prose of the sort Kraus herself often avoids, I was captivated by the narrative style of the opening part.

Being a reader who favors precise prose of the variety that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. There is a fresh level of observation that accommodates minutiae, like the container that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the start of the story, helped by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a great plaything", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". She tells the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."

Frustration and Disruption

I was destined to be disappointed when I hoped this different style could persist to the end. The author states here that she resents the enjoyment readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works comes back in the central part. Catt is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between two different states, failing to help Paul control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a society driven by the hostility and dread that underpins a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on social media, her occupation changed from "author" to "landlord" on a reference site. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. In a moment she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before leaving Minnesota, "she might be able to learn something about an America that her social media opponents would fail to comprehend, would overlook entirely".

The Killing Story

Then we reach to the murder itself – and the eponymous day passed by the deceased with the perpetrator and his companions. Kraus utilizes great source material, and knows hour by hour what transpired when the victim Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she offered adult photos. He was hoping for sex but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. Yet I wished her to go further into her personal fixations here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt seeing herself in 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 extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par