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The Four Spent the Day Together centers on characters pursuing fresh starts, struggling to escape drugs or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into violence. Kraus often employs the phrase "fresh start", rendering it deliberately jaded through recurring use. Examples include "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the narrative. At the same time, Kraus herself is embarking on her personal new beginning, since this seems a novel form of writing – fact-based, authentically narrative. But then it reveals itself to be packed with the same dilemmas and approaches as her previous works.

From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book

Kraus was originally an artist who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, transforming personal female narrative from self-debasement into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels missed the power and directness that the letter form brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her position as a maverick maker who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It is logical that she currently desires to try out different types of content, turning outward to external narratives, at a time when she states that current political era makes confessional writing redundant.

Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering several time periods – none able to break free from their pasts. The book includes the tale of characters Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, relocating from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. There is the account of Kraus, in the guise of Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction a man named Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a community long abandoned by progressive politics only a short distance from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader attracted to honed writing of the kind Kraus tends to eschew, I was seduced by the literary tone of the opening part.

As someone who reads who appreciates honed writing of the variety that the author usually avoids, I was captivated by the storytelling approach of the initial part. There is a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for minutiae, like the bucket that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the start of the story, helped by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a great plaything", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like piece candy". The author narrates Emma's narrative with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this different style could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she resents the pleasure audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to disruption, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her hero Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels reasserts itself in the middle section. The protagonist is attempting to do up multiple decrepit residences in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting Paul manage his alcohol use. She experiences powerlessness as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a environment propelled by the anger and fear that underpins an electoral success. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "real estate holder" on a reference site. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. In a moment she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an America that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even see".

The Killing Story

Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the eponymous day passed by the deceased with the murderer and his friends. Kraus utilizes excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what transpired 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 with her companions, wandering about getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being shot by Brittney's partner Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that Catt speaks to Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par