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This latest work features individuals pursuing new beginnings, trying to break free from addictions or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into conflict. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", making it willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the story. At the same time, Kraus herself is embarking on her own fresh start, since this seems a new kind of book – observational, authentically narrative. But then it proves to be packed with the recurring issues and approaches as her previous works.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

Kraus was originally an visual artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating personal female narrative from self-debasement into defiance. She kept producing books, but the following three engaging and challenging novels lacked the power and directness that the correspondence format brought to the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her position as a maverick maker who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It is logical that she currently desires to experiment with new kinds of material, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a moment when she claims that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing unnecessary.

Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, encompassing multiple eras – all unable to escape their backgrounds. There is the narrative about Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, moving from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. There is the account of Kraus, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. Finally the narrative of a homicide of one directionless individual by another in a town largely deserted by progressive politics only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader drawn to refined literature of the kind Kraus herself often avoids, I was seduced by the narrative style of the initial segment.

As a reader who favors precise prose of the style that the author usually avoids, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the first section. It possesses a fresh level of observation that allows space for minutiae, like the bucket that the young Catt frees from the ice at the start of the story, helped by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like hard candy". She tells Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was fated to feel let down when I wished this fresh tone could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disruption, to the untidy aesthetics she has in common with her idol author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her earlier works reasserts itself in the central part. The protagonist is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while moving between Minnesota and LA, unsuccessful in assisting her husband manage his alcohol use. She is overwhelmed as her spouse cycles through low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a society driven by the rage and anxiety that underpins an electoral success. A significant portion discusses about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her occupation changed from "writer" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. At one point she remarks that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she might be able to learn something about an America that her Twitter detractors would fail to comprehend, would not even see".

The Killing Story

So then we come to the murder itself – and the eponymous day experienced by the murdered individual with the murderer and his friends. Kraus has excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what happened when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day with her companions, loitering getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being shot by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for aggressive outbursts.

Fascination and Incompletion

The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and daring boundary-pushing clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who comes alive in part due to the protagonist's connection to her – another bright, bullied girl spiraling out of control in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the point that her narrative ends almost mid-par