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The new book centers on characters pursuing fresh starts, trying to break free from addictions or toxic relationships, only to witness hope devolve into violence. The author often employs the phrase "clean slate", making it deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the story. Meanwhile, she seems to be making her personal new beginning, because this seems a different type of work – fact-based, authentically narrative. However it reveals itself to be filled with the recurring issues and styles as earlier books.

From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work

Kraus started out as an creative who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming intimate women's literature from self-debasement into rebellion. She kept producing books, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the letter form infused into the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her role as a renegade artist who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on housing investments. It is logical that she now wants to try out different types of content, turning outward to other people's stories, at a period in which she states that current political era makes confessional writing obsolete.

Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering several time periods – all unable to escape their histories. There is the tale of Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, relocating from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the guise of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband a man named Paul. The third thread involves the story of the murder of one troubled youth by another in a locality long abandoned by progressive politics only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.

For this reader attracted to honed writing of the kind Kraus herself often avoids, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the first section.

Being a reader who appreciates crafted language of the kind that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. There is a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for minutiae, like the pail that the protagonist as a child dislodges from ice at the opening of the book, aided by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a great plaything", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like piece candy". Kraus writes the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not entirely her own."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this different style could persist to the end. The author states here that she resents the enjoyment readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she shares with her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works reasserts itself in the second segment. Catt Greene is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a society driven by the rage and anxiety that drives a political win. A significant portion discusses about Catt being cancelled on social media, her professional designation altered from "author" to "real estate holder" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an America that her Twitter detractors would be unable to grasp, would not even see".

The Murder Narrative

So then we come to the murder itself – and the referenced day passed by the victim with the killer and his associates. The author possesses excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what transpired when the victim Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He sought a sexual encounter but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, wandering about getting his car mended and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt's identification with 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 jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par