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The Four Spent the Day Together centers on characters chasing after fresh starts, trying to break free from addictions or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into aggression. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", making it deliberately jaded through recurring use. Phrases such as "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the text. Meanwhile, Kraus herself seems to be making her personal new beginning, as this presents as a new kind of book – documentarian, truly literary. Yet it reveals itself to be filled with the same dilemmas and approaches as earlier books.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

Kraus was originally an artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, structured as missives to a distant beloved, transforming intimate women's literature from self-debasement into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style imparted to the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a renegade artist who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on real estate deals. It follows that she presently aims to explore fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a period in which she states that current political era makes confessional writing obsolete.

Several Eras, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning three generations – all unable to escape their histories. The book includes the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, versions of the author's parents, moving from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. There is the narrative of the author, in the character of protagonist Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a locality largely deserted by liberal ideals only a short distance from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.

From my perspective as a reader drawn to refined literature of the kind Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the narrative style of the initial segment.

As someone who reads drawn to crafted language of the kind that Kraus usually avoids, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the initial part. It exhibits a fresh level of observation that makes room for minutiae, like the container that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the opening of the book, aided by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a nice toy", he answers, "the elliptical meanings of words rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". The author narrates Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this different style could continue through the novel. The author states here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment those who appreciate polished prose have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the unpolished style she shares with her idol author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels reasserts itself in the middle section. Catt is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help her husband manage his alcohol use. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a environment driven by the rage and anxiety that powers a political win. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her professional designation altered from "author" to "property owner" on a reference site. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. At one point she states that she's looking into the killing so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her online critics would not understand, would not even see".

The Homicide Account

Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the titular day passed by the victim with the perpetrator and his companions. Kraus utilizes great source material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, loitering having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

Catt develops an obsession by the narrative, and I found myself captivated by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. However, I would have preferred her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who gains dimension partially because of Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par