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This latest work features protagonists seeking clean slates, attempting to leave behind addictions or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", rendering it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the narrative. Meanwhile, Kraus herself seems to be making her own fresh start, since this seems a different type of work – documentarian, authentically narrative. Yet it turns out to be laden with the same dilemmas and styles as earlier books.

From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic

The writer was originally an visual artist who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, converting confessional female writing from self-debasement into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style imparted to the voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a nonconformist creator who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It follows that she now wants to try out fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a moment when she asserts that current political era turns intimate literature redundant.

Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, encompassing several time periods – all unable to escape their pasts. We encounter the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, moving from the New York borough to the Connecticut countryside. Additionally the narrative of the author, in the guise of Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her partner struggling with addiction a man named Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a community largely deserted by forward-thinking policies 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 sort Kraus herself often avoids, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the first section.

As a reader who favors crafted language of the style that the author often disregards, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. There is a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for trivial aspects, like the pail that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her adored dad. "I found an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a great plaything", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like piece candy". She tells the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not entirely her own."

Frustration and Disruption

I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this different style could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disruption, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her idol Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels returns in the middle section. Catt Greene is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid her husband manage his alcohol use. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a society fueled by the anger and fear that drives an electoral success. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her professional designation altered from "author" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she says that she's investigating the murder so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an America that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even perceive".

The Homicide Account

Thus we arrive to the homicide in question – and the titular day experienced by the victim with the murderer and his companions. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, loitering fixing his automobile and funding treats and narcotics, before being murdered by her romantic interest Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt develops an obsession by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par