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The Four Spent the Day Together features protagonists pursuing new beginnings, attempting to leave behind substance abuse or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into aggression. The author often employs the phrase "clean slate", making it willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the story. And yet, Kraus herself appears to be undertaking her individual reinvention, as this presents as a different type of work – fact-based, authentically narrative. However it reveals itself to be filled with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as past novels.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

Kraus was originally an artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating personal female narrative from humiliation into rebellion. She kept producing books, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format brought to the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a nonconformist creator who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It follows that she currently desires to explore new kinds of material, turning outward to other people's stories, at a period in which she states that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing obsolete.

Several Eras, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering several time periods – all unable to escape their pasts. We encounter the narrative about Emma and Jasper, representations of Kraus's parents, relocating from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one directionless individual by another in a locality largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.

From my perspective as a reader drawn to honed writing of the sort Kraus often avoids, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the first section.

Being a reader who favors precise prose of the variety that Kraus often disregards, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for small details, like the pail that the young Catt dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a great plaything", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like sweet treats". The author narrates Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this different style could last out the book. The author states here that she resents the satisfaction readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she has in common with her idol Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works returns in the second segment. The protagonist is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between two different states, unsuccessful in assisting her husband control his drinking. She feels helpless as her spouse moves between underfunded jobs as an substance abuse counselor in a society propelled by the rage and anxiety that underpins a political win. A significant portion discusses about the protagonist facing cancellation on a platform, her occupation changed from "novelist" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she says that she's looking into the killing so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn something about an the United States that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even see".

The Homicide Account

So then we come to the actual killing – and the titular day spent by the deceased with the killer and his associates. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when the victim Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day with her companions, wandering about getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

Catt develops an obsession by the narrative, and I found myself captivated by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The standout figure is Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. This entire part feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par