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The new book is populated with characters pursuing new beginnings, trying to break free from substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into conflict. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", making it deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" recur in the text. Meanwhile, the author herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, because this appears a different type of work – fact-based, authentically narrative. However it proves to be filled with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as earlier books.

From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work

The writer began as an artist who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, transforming personal female narrative from humiliation into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the power and directness that the letter form infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a maverick maker who had become a major property owner, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It is logical that she currently desires to experiment with fresh narrative sources, turning outward to external narratives, at a moment when she states that current political era renders personal narrative redundant.

Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering multiple eras – all unable to escape their backgrounds. We encounter the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, relocating from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. Finally the story of the murder of one directionless individual by another in a community mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only 80 miles from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.

As a reader drawn to honed writing of the type Kraus often avoids, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the first section.

As someone who reads who appreciates precise prose of the variety that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the initial part. It possesses a novel degree of detail that accommodates small details, like the pail that the young Catt dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her cherished parent. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a great plaything", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". The author narrates the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."

Frustration and Disruption

I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this new voice could persist to the end. The author states here that she dislikes the pleasure readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her earlier works comes back in the central part. Catt Greene is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in the city's most challenging districts while moving between two different states, failing to help Paul control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a environment driven by the anger and fear that powers an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on a platform, her listed profession modified from "writer" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. At one point she states that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even perceive".

The Killing Story

Thus we arrive to the actual killing – and the titular day spent by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his companions. The author possesses excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day with her companions, loitering fixing his automobile and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the point that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par