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The new book features individuals chasing after fresh starts, struggling to escape addictions or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into violence. The author frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", rendering it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" recur in the story. Meanwhile, she seems to be making her individual reinvention, since this seems a new kind of book – fact-based, truly literary. But then it turns out to be laden with the recurring issues and aesthetics as earlier books.

From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book

Kraus started out as an artist who became a writer 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 humiliation into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the impact and rawness that the epistolary style infused into the voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a maverick maker who had evolved into a extensive real estate holder, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It makes sense that she presently aims to experiment with different types of content, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a period in which she states that current political era renders personal narrative obsolete.

Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering multiple eras – each trapped by their pasts. We encounter the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, moving from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the character of Catt Greene, grappling with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one directionless individual by another in a town long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.

As a reader attracted to polished prose of the kind the author herself often avoids, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the first section.

Being a reader drawn to precise prose of the variety that Kraus usually avoids, I was won over by the literary tone of the first section. There is a fresh level of observation that allows space for small details, like the bucket that the young Catt dislodges from ice at the start of the story, aided by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a great plaything", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language rolling around in their mouths like hard candy". She tells the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not entirely her own."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this fresh tone could last out the book. The author states here that she is annoyed by the pleasure readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her inspiration Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her past books returns in the central part. Catt Greene is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help her husband control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a world fueled by the rage and anxiety that powers a political win. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her listed profession modified from "author" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. At one point she says that she's investigating the murder so that before departing the state, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her social media opponents would not understand, would overlook entirely".

The Homicide Account

Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the titular day passed by the victim with the killer and his friends. Kraus has great source material, and details moment by moment what occurred as a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, mooching around getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The standout figure is Brittney, who gains dimension in part due to Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par