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The Four Spent the Day Together features individuals pursuing new beginnings, trying to break free from drugs or toxic relationships, only to see hope turn into aggression. Kraus frequently uses the phrase "new beginning", rendering it intentionally weary through recurring use. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They chose to begin anew" appear throughout the narrative. Meanwhile, she seems to be making her individual reinvention, because this appears a novel form of writing – observational, truly literary. But then it proves to be packed with the familiar conflicts and styles as her previous works.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

The writer was originally an artist who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting confessional female writing from abjection into assassination. She kept producing books, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels did not possess the impact and rawness that the letter form brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a renegade artist who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It follows that she currently desires to explore new kinds of material, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a time when she states that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative obsolete.

Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning several time periods – all unable to escape their histories. We encounter the story of characters Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, moving from the Bronx to a pastoral setting. There is the narrative of the author, in the character of Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a community long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.

For this reader attracted to honed writing of the type Kraus herself typically rejects, I was captivated by the literary tone of the initial segment.

As someone who reads drawn to honed writing of the kind that Kraus herself often disregards, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the first section. It exhibits a fresh level of observation that makes room for minutiae, like the container that the protagonist as a child dislodges from ice at the opening of the book, assisted by her adored dad. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like hard candy". 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 fated to feel let down when I wished this fresh tone could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the enjoyment readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her idol Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels reasserts itself in the central part. Catt Greene is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help her husband manage his alcohol use. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a society fueled by the anger and fear that drives a political win. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her professional designation altered from "author" to "landlord" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. In a moment she says that she's investigating the murder so that before departing the state, "she could potentially understand something about an America that her social media opponents would fail to comprehend, would not even see".

The Homicide Account

So then we come to the homicide in question – and the referenced day experienced by the victim with the killer and his friends. Kraus has excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what transpired when a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, loitering fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by her romantic interest Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The standout figure is Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through the protagonist's connection to 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. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par