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The Four Spent the Day Together features protagonists chasing after fresh starts, struggling to escape substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into conflict. Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", making it intentionally weary through recurring use. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" are scattered across the text. Meanwhile, the author herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, as this appears a novel form of writing – documentarian, truly literary. Yet it turns out to be laden with the familiar conflicts and styles as past novels.

From Chance Novelist to Iconic Work

Kraus began as an creative who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating personal female narrative from abjection into assassination. She kept producing books, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the power and directness that the correspondence format infused into the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a renegade artist who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It is logical that she presently aims to explore fresh narrative sources, turning outward to external narratives, at a time when she asserts that Trumpian politics renders personal narrative obsolete.

Several Eras, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering several time periods – none able to break free from their pasts. We encounter the narrative about Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, transitioning from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. There is the narrative of the author, in the character of Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction her husband Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a town largely deserted by progressive politics only a short distance from the protagonist's home in rural Minnesota.

As a reader fond of refined literature of the type Kraus often avoids, I was seduced by the narrative style of the first section.

Being a reader who favors honed writing of the style that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was won over by the literary tone of the opening segment. There is a fresh level of observation that makes room for trivial aspects, like the container that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the start of the story, helped by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a nice toy", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". The author narrates Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not entirely her own."

Frustration and Disruption

I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this different style 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 devoted to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her past books returns in the second segment. Catt is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid Paul curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as her spouse cycles through poorly supported positions as an addiction therapist in a society propelled by the rage and anxiety that underpins Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on a platform, her listed profession modified from "writer" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. At one point she remarks that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an America that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even see".

The Homicide Account

So then we come to the murder itself – and the eponymous day passed by the deceased with the perpetrator and his associates. The author possesses excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what happened when a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for aggressive outbursts.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt develops an obsession by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and reckless transgression tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The standout figure 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. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par