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This latest work is populated with individuals seeking fresh starts, trying to break free from substance abuse or harmful partnerships, only to witness hope devolve into violence. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", making it willfully cynical through recurring use. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They opted for a clean break" recur in the text. And yet, the author herself seems to be making her own fresh start, as this presents as a different type of work – fact-based, authentically narrative. However it turns out to be packed with the familiar conflicts and approaches as past novels.

From Chance Novelist to Iconic Work

The writer was originally an visual artist who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as missives to a distant beloved, elevating intimate women's literature from humiliation into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the impact and rawness that the correspondence format infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a maverick maker who had evolved into a major property owner, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It makes sense that she currently desires to explore new kinds of material, turning outward to external narratives, at a period in which she asserts that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative obsolete.

Several Eras, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering multiple eras – none able to break free from their histories. We encounter the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, versions of Kraus's parents, relocating from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. Additionally the account of Kraus, in the character of Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. The third thread involves the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a community long abandoned by liberal ideals only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader drawn to refined literature of the sort Kraus typically rejects, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.

As a reader who favors honed writing of the kind that Kraus herself often disregards, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the first section. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for minutiae, like the container that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a nice toy", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like sweet treats". She tells Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."

Disappointment and Disjunction

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 enjoyment audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disruption, to the untidy aesthetics she has in common with her hero author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels returns in the second segment. Catt is attempting to do up multiple decrepit residences in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid her husband control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as Paul cycles through poorly supported positions as an recovery specialist in a environment propelled by the rage and anxiety that drives Trump's victory. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on social media, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "real estate holder" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. At one point she states that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she might be able to learn something about an the United States that her online critics would not understand, would not even perceive".

The Homicide Account

Then we reach to the actual killing – and the titular day spent by the victim with the murderer and his friends. Kraus has excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what happened when Brandon came to see Brittney after connecting via an application where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, mooching around having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I found myself captivated by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to go further into her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who becomes vivid partially because of Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels strangely incomplete, to the point that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par