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This latest work centers on individuals seeking new beginnings, struggling to escape substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", transforming it into willfully cynical through recurring use. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the narrative. Meanwhile, the author herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, since this seems a different type of work – documentarian, truly literary. However it proves to be packed with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as past novels.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

Kraus started out as an artist who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, converting confessional female writing from abjection into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style imparted to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her role as a nonconformist creator who had evolved into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on real estate deals. It follows that she currently desires to explore new kinds of material, turning outward to other people's stories, at a period in which she claims that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative redundant.

Several Eras, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning multiple eras – all unable to escape their pasts. The book includes the story of characters Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, relocating from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the guise of Catt Greene, confronting the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a town largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.

For this reader drawn to refined literature of the kind Kraus tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the first section.

As someone who reads who favors precise prose of the kind that Kraus tends to eschew, I was captivated by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. It possesses a fresh level of observation that accommodates trivial aspects, like the container that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a great plaything", he replies, "the nuanced interpretations of terms rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". She tells Emma's narrative with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."

Frustration and Disruption

I was fated to feel let down when I expected this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she dislikes the enjoyment readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the unpolished style she has in common with her idol author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels returns in the second segment. The protagonist is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between two different states, failing to help Paul control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between underfunded jobs as an substance abuse counselor in a world fueled by the rage and anxiety that drives an electoral success. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her listed profession modified from "author" to "property owner" on a reference site. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. At one point she states that she's looking into the killing so that before exiting the region, "she could potentially understand something about an America that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would overlook entirely".

The Homicide Account

Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the titular day experienced by the murdered individual with the murderer and his companions. The author possesses great source material, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day in the company of her associates, mooching around fixing his automobile and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing clash in this segment. Yet I wished her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par