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The Four Spent the Day Together centers on individuals chasing after fresh starts, struggling to escape addictions or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into violence. Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into willfully cynical through recurring use. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the story. Meanwhile, the author herself is embarking on her personal new beginning, since this appears a new kind of book – documentarian, truly literary. Yet it turns out to be packed with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as past novels.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

Kraus began as an artist who transitioned to writing unintentionally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating confessional female writing from abjection into defiance. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the power and directness that the epistolary style infused into the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a renegade artist who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It follows that she currently desires to explore new kinds of material, looking outwards to external narratives, at a period in which she asserts that current political era renders personal narrative redundant.

Several Eras, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning multiple eras – each trapped by their backgrounds. There is the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, moving from the urban environment to a pastoral setting. There is the narrative of the author, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a community mostly forsaken by liberal ideals only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader attracted to polished prose of the kind Kraus herself typically rejects, I was seduced by the narrative style of the initial segment.

Being a reader drawn to precise prose of the style that Kraus usually avoids, I was captivated by the storytelling approach of the first section. It possesses a novel degree of detail that makes room for trivial aspects, like the container that the young Catt frees from the ice at the opening of the book, helped by her adored dad. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a great plaything", he answers, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like hard candy". She tells Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not entirely her own."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was fated to feel let down when I expected this new voice could persist to the end. The author states here that she is annoyed by the pleasure those who appreciate polished prose have derived from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the unpolished style she echoes from her idol author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her past books reasserts itself in the second segment. Catt Greene is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between Minnesota and LA, unsuccessful in assisting Paul manage his alcohol use. She experiences powerlessness as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a environment driven by the rage and anxiety that powers an electoral success. A significant portion discusses about Catt being cancelled on social media, her listed profession modified from "writer" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. On one occasion she says that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would overlook entirely".

The Killing Story

Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the titular day experienced by the deceased with the perpetrator and his companions. The author possesses great source material, and details moment by moment what happened when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He sought a sexual encounter but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, wandering about getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing clash in this segment. Yet I wished her to delve deeper into her individual preoccupations here. The standout figure is Brittney herself, who comes alive partly through Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a struggling, neglected community. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par