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The Four Spent the Day Together centers on individuals seeking clean slates, struggling to escape addictions or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into violence. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", making it willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" are scattered across the story. And yet, Kraus herself appears to be undertaking her personal new beginning, as this appears a novel form of writing – fact-based, truly literary. Yet it turns out to be packed with the same dilemmas and styles as her previous works.

From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work

Kraus was originally an artist who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, transforming personal female narrative from abjection into rebellion. She kept producing books, but the following three engaging and challenging novels lacked the power and directness that the letter form brought to the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a nonconformist creator who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It makes sense that she now wants to try out different types of content, turning outward to other people's stories, at a moment when she states that current political era turns intimate literature obsolete.

Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing several time periods – each trapped by their pasts. There is the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, transitioning from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. Finally the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a locality mostly forsaken by progressive politics only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in rural Minnesota.

For this reader fond of polished prose of the type Kraus herself typically rejects, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the first section.

As someone who reads drawn to honed writing of the kind that Kraus usually avoids, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the first section. There is a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for trivial aspects, like the bucket that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her cherished parent. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like piece candy". The author narrates Emma's story with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this new voice could last out the book. Kraus says here that she dislikes the pleasure audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she has in common with her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels returns in the central part. Catt Greene is attempting to do up multiple decrepit residences in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between two different states, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul transitions between low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a environment propelled by the hostility and dread that underpins Trump's victory. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on social media, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. On one occasion she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would fail to comprehend, would not even see".

The Killing Story

Then we reach to the murder itself – and the titular day spent by the deceased with the perpetrator and his friends. Kraus has compelling foundational content, and details moment by moment what occurred as the victim Brandon came to visit Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He sought a sexual encounter but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has often been institutionalized for aggressive outbursts.

Fascination and Incompletion

The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The standout figure is Brittney, who comes alive partly through Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the point that her narrative ends almost mid-par