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The new book features characters seeking clean slates, struggling to escape addictions or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into aggression. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", making it willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the text. And yet, the author herself appears to be undertaking her individual reinvention, because this presents as a different type of work – observational, truly literary. Yet it turns out to be filled with the familiar conflicts and approaches as her previous works.

From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic

Kraus was originally an artist who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, transforming personal female narrative from self-debasement into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels missed the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format brought to the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a nonconformist creator who had become a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It is logical that she presently aims to try out fresh narrative sources, turning outward to external narratives, at a time when she asserts that Trumpian politics makes confessional writing obsolete.

Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning multiple eras – each trapped by their pasts. We encounter the narrative about Emma and Jasper, representations of Kraus's parents, relocating from the New York borough to a pastoral setting. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the character of Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. Finally the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a locality long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader fond of polished prose of the kind the author herself typically rejects, I was seduced by the literary tone of the first section.

As a reader who favors crafted language of the kind that Kraus herself often disregards, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the initial part. There is a novel degree of detail that accommodates minutiae, like the bucket that the young Catt dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a nice toy", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language rolling around in their mouths like hard candy". She tells the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was destined to be disappointed when I hoped this different style could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the satisfaction audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the unpolished style she shares with her hero author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels returns in the central part. The protagonist is attempting to do up multiple decrepit residences in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between two different states, failing to help Paul manage his alcohol use. She experiences powerlessness as Paul transitions between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a world propelled by the anger and fear that drives Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on social media, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "real estate holder" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. In a moment she says that she's investigating the murder so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her online critics would not understand, would not even perceive".

The Homicide Account

Thus we arrive to the actual killing – and the eponymous day passed by the murdered individual with the murderer and his companions. Kraus utilizes excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but seems affably to have spent the day in the company of her associates, loitering fixing his automobile and funding treats and narcotics, before being shot by her romantic interest Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for aggressive outbursts.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. Yet I wished her to explore more thoroughly her own obsessions here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who comes alive in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. This entire part feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par