🔗 Share this article

The new book features protagonists pursuing clean slates, attempting to leave behind drugs or toxic relationships, only to witness hope devolve into violence. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", rendering it willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the text. At the same time, Kraus herself is embarking on her individual reinvention, because this presents as a new kind of book – observational, truly literary. Yet it proves to be packed with the same dilemmas and styles as past novels.

From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book

Kraus started out as an visual artist who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, converting personal female narrative from self-debasement into defiance. She kept producing books, but the following three fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the impact and rawness that the epistolary style infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a maverick maker who had turned into a extensive real estate holder, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It follows that she presently aims to try out fresh narrative sources, turning outward to external narratives, at a moment when she claims that Trumpian politics makes confessional writing obsolete.

Several Eras, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing three generations – none able to break free from their pasts. There is the tale of characters Emma and Jasper, versions of Kraus's parents, moving from the Bronx to a pastoral setting. Then there is the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of protagonist Catt Greene, confronting the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a locality largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.

For this reader attracted to refined literature of the kind Kraus herself typically rejects, I was seduced by the literary tone of the initial segment.

Being a reader who favors honed writing of the style that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the first section. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for small details, like the bucket that the young Catt frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her adored dad. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a nice toy", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". The author narrates Emma's story with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not entirely her own."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this new voice could last out the book. The author states here that she is annoyed by the satisfaction those who appreciate polished prose have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she echoes from her hero Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her past books returns in the second segment. Catt Greene is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between two different states, failing to help Paul control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as her spouse cycles through underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a society driven by the anger and fear that underpins an electoral success. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on social media, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she states that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an America that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".

The Homicide Account

So then we come to the murder itself – and the referenced day spent by the victim with the perpetrator and his friends. Kraus utilizes great source material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when the victim Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He sought a sexual encounter but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, wandering about fixing his automobile and funding treats and narcotics, before being murdered by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to explore more thoroughly her own obsessions here. The standout figure is Brittney herself, who comes alive partly through Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par