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The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with characters pursuing clean slates, attempting to leave behind substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into conflict. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into willfully cynical through recurring use. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They opted for a clean break" are scattered across the text. At the same time, the author herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, because this presents as a novel form of writing – fact-based, truly literary. Yet it turns out to be filled with the recurring issues and approaches as earlier books.

From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work

Kraus began as an artist who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting confessional female writing from humiliation into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels did not possess the impact and rawness that the epistolary style brought to the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a renegade artist who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was significant attention on housing investments. It follows that she now wants to experiment with fresh narrative sources, turning outward to external narratives, at a period in which she claims that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative obsolete.

Several Eras, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering three generations – all unable to escape their histories. The book includes the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, representations of Kraus's parents, moving from the New York borough to a pastoral setting. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the guise of Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband a man named Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one directionless individual by another in a community largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader drawn to honed writing of the sort Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the literary tone of the initial segment.

Being a reader who favors honed writing of the variety that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was won over by the literary tone of the first section. There is a fresh level of observation that allows space for trivial aspects, like the bucket that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her cherished parent. "I found an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like piece candy". Kraus writes Emma's story with interest and closeness. "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 expected this fresh tone could last out the book. The author states here that she is annoyed by the pleasure audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her idol Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works returns in the middle section. Catt is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while moving between two different states, failing to help Paul control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as Paul cycles through underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a environment propelled by the anger and fear that underpins a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her listed profession modified from "writer" to "landlord" on a reference site. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. At one point she remarks that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her social media opponents would not understand, would not even see".

The Homicide Account

Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the referenced day spent by the deceased with the perpetrator and his friends. Kraus utilizes great source material, and details moment by moment what occurred as a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she offered adult photos. He sought a sexual encounter but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, mooching around fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and daring boundary-pushing wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to go further into her personal fixations here. The standout figure is Brittney, who comes alive partly through Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par