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The Four Spent the Day Together features individuals pursuing fresh starts, trying to break free from addictions or harmful partnerships, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", making it deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the story. And yet, the author herself is embarking on her own fresh start, because this presents as a different type of work – observational, truly literary. Yet it turns out to be laden with the recurring issues and aesthetics as her previous works.

From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book

The writer was originally an visual artist who entered the literary world somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating intimate women's literature from humiliation into assassination. She continued writing, but the following three compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the power and directness that the letter form brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a maverick maker who had evolved into a major property owner, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It is logical that she presently aims to experiment with fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to external narratives, at a moment when she claims that current political era makes confessional writing obsolete.

Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing multiple eras – all unable to escape their histories. There is the tale of characters Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, transitioning from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband a man named Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a community long abandoned by progressive politics only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader drawn to polished prose of the sort Kraus often avoids, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the opening part.

Being a reader who favors crafted language of the kind that the author often disregards, I was won over by the novelistic voice of the initial part. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for minutiae, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the opening of the book, helped by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". She tells the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not entirely her own."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this fresh tone could persist to the end. The author states here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works returns in the second segment. The protagonist is working on refurbishing three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help her husband manage his alcohol use. She feels helpless as Paul transitions between underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a society propelled by the rage and anxiety that underpins a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "author" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment 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 be unable to grasp, would overlook entirely".

The Killing Story

Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day passed by the murdered individual with the murderer and his friends. The author possesses excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what happened when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day in the company of her associates, loitering having his vehicle repaired and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who gains dimension in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the point that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par