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The Four Spent the Day Together features characters chasing after clean slates, struggling to escape addictions or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into violence. Kraus frequently uses the phrase "new beginning", transforming it into willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Examples include "He aimed to start over" and "They opted for a clean break" recur in the text. At the same time, the author herself is embarking on her own fresh start, as this presents as a novel form of writing – documentarian, truly literary. But then it turns out to be laden with the recurring issues and styles as her previous works.

From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic

Kraus started out as an artist who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, converting personal female narrative from humiliation into defiance. She kept producing books, but the following three engaging and challenging novels missed the power and directness that the correspondence format infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her role as a renegade artist who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It is logical that she currently desires to experiment with new kinds of material, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a moment when she claims that current political era renders personal narrative unnecessary.

Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning three generations – all unable to escape their pasts. There is the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, moving from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one directionless individual by another in a town largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.

As a reader fond of refined literature of the type Kraus tends to eschew, I was seduced by the narrative style of the initial segment.

As a reader drawn to precise prose of the kind that Kraus tends to eschew, I was won over by the literary tone of the first section. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that makes room for small details, like the pail that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her adored dad. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a great plaything", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words rolling around in their mouths like hard candy". She tells Emma's story with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not entirely her own."

Frustration and Disruption

I was destined to be disappointed when I wished this new voice could continue through the novel. The author states here that she dislikes the enjoyment readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels reasserts itself in the middle section. Catt is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while shuttling between two different states, failing to help Paul manage his alcohol use. She experiences powerlessness as her spouse transitions between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a world driven by the anger and fear that powers Trump's victory. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her occupation changed from "novelist" to "landlord" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she remarks that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an America that her online critics would not understand, would not even see".

The Murder Narrative

So then we come to the homicide in question – and the referenced day experienced by the murdered individual with the murderer and his associates. Kraus has great source material, and knows hour by hour what transpired when the victim Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He sought a sexual encounter but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, wandering about getting his car mended and funding treats and narcotics, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par