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The Four Spent the Day Together features protagonists seeking clean slates, attempting to leave behind addictions or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", making it willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Examples include "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the story. At the same time, she seems to be making her own fresh start, because this seems a new kind of book – fact-based, truly literary. But then it reveals itself to be laden with the same dilemmas and styles as past novels.

From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work

Kraus started out as an creative who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, elevating confessional female writing from abjection into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the power and directness that the letter form imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a renegade artist who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was significant attention on real estate deals. It makes sense 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 turns intimate literature redundant.

Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning multiple eras – all unable to escape their backgrounds. There is the narrative about Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, relocating from the New York borough to the Connecticut countryside. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of Catt Greene, confronting the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband her husband Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a locality long abandoned by liberal ideals only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.

For this reader fond of polished prose of the sort the author herself often avoids, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the initial segment.

As a reader who appreciates precise prose of the kind that Kraus tends to eschew, I was captivated by the storytelling approach of the initial part. It possesses a fresh level of observation that accommodates minutiae, like the pail that the young Catt frees from the ice at the start of the story, assisted by her adored dad. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a great plaything", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like hard candy". She tells the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this different style could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she resents the satisfaction audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she has in common with her idol Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works returns in the central part. Catt is attempting to do up multiple decrepit residences in the city's most challenging districts while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid her husband manage his alcohol use. She feels helpless as her spouse moves between underfunded jobs as an substance abuse counselor in a society fueled by the rage and anxiety that underpins a political win. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "landlord" on a reference site. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. At one point she states that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her online critics would not understand, would not even perceive".

The Killing Story

So then we come to the murder itself – and the referenced day experienced by the deceased with the perpetrator and his associates. Kraus utilizes excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what occurred as a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He sought a sexual encounter but seems affably to have spent the day in the company of her associates, loitering getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt develops an obsession by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partly through the protagonist's connection to her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The complete segment feels oddly unfinished, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par