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This latest work features characters chasing after new beginnings, struggling to escape drugs or harmful partnerships, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", rendering it deliberately jaded through recurring use. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They opted for a clean break" recur in the story. At the same time, she is embarking on her personal new beginning, because this seems a different type of work – observational, truly literary. Yet it turns out to be packed with the same dilemmas and styles as earlier books.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

Kraus started out as an creative who transitioned to writing unintentionally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, elevating confessional female writing from humiliation into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the following three engaging and challenging novels lacked the impact and rawness that the epistolary style infused into the voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a maverick maker who had evolved into a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It is logical that she currently desires to try out new kinds of material, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a time when she states that current political era turns intimate literature obsolete.

Several Eras, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, encompassing several time periods – each trapped by their histories. There is the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, transitioning from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a locality long abandoned by liberal ideals only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.

For this reader attracted to refined literature of the kind the author herself often avoids, I was seduced by the literary tone of the opening part.

Being a reader who favors honed writing of the variety that Kraus herself often disregards, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the initial part. It possesses a novel degree of detail that allows space for minutiae, like the container that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, assisted by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a great plaything", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". She tells Emma's narrative with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."

Frustration and Disruption

I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this new voice could last out the book. The author states here that she dislikes the satisfaction audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her idol author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels reasserts itself in the central part. Catt is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between poorly supported positions as an addiction therapist in a world fueled by the rage and anxiety that drives Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her occupation changed from "author" to "landlord" on a reference site. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. On one occasion she remarks that she's investigating the murder so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would overlook entirely".

The Murder Narrative

So then we come to the homicide in question – and the titular day spent by the deceased with the murderer and his companions. Kraus has excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what happened when Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day with her companions, wandering about fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and reckless transgression tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations 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 derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels oddly unfinished, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par