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The new book features individuals chasing after clean slates, attempting to leave behind addictions or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into violence. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", transforming it into intentionally weary through recurring use. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" are scattered across the story. And yet, she seems to be making her own fresh start, as this appears a novel form of writing – observational, truly literary. Yet it reveals itself to be filled with the same dilemmas and styles as her previous works.

From Accidental Writer to Iconic Work

The writer was originally an artist who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating confessional female writing from abjection into assassination. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format infused into the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a renegade artist who had evolved into a major property owner, so there was significant attention on real estate deals. It is logical that she now wants to experiment with different types of content, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a period in which she asserts that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing obsolete.

Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, spanning multiple eras – all unable to escape their backgrounds. There is the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, moving from the urban environment to a pastoral setting. There is the account of Kraus, in the character of Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a community long abandoned by liberal ideals only a short distance from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.

From my perspective as a reader attracted to honed writing of the type Kraus typically rejects, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the first section.

As someone who reads drawn to honed writing of the variety that Kraus herself often disregards, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the initial part. There is a novel degree of detail that accommodates minutiae, like the pail that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her adored dad. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like sweet treats". Kraus writes Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not entirely her own."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this fresh tone could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she resents the enjoyment audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disruption, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her past books comes back in the central part. Catt Greene is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help her husband control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through poorly supported positions as an recovery specialist in a environment fueled by the rage and anxiety that powers Trump's victory. A significant portion discusses about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "author" to "landlord" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she states that she's looking into the killing so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her social media opponents would fail to comprehend, would not even see".

The Murder Narrative

So then we come to the murder itself – and the titular day spent by the deceased with the killer and his associates. Kraus utilizes excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what happened when the victim Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, loitering having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being shot by her romantic interest Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for aggressive outbursts.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt develops an obsession by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. However, I would have preferred her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who becomes vivid partially because of Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the point that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par