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The Four Spent the Day Together features protagonists seeking new beginnings, attempting to leave behind addictions or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into violence. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", making it willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the text. And yet, Kraus herself appears to be undertaking her individual reinvention, because this appears a different type of work – observational, authentically narrative. However it reveals itself to be filled with the familiar conflicts and approaches as earlier books.

From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic

Kraus began as an artist who entered the literary world somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, converting personal female narrative from abjection into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a maverick maker who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It follows that she now wants to explore new kinds of material, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a time when she asserts that Trumpian politics renders personal narrative redundant.

Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering three generations – none able to break free from their backgrounds. The book includes the story of characters Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, transitioning from the Bronx to a pastoral setting. Additionally the narrative of the author, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one directionless individual by another in a town largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only 80 miles from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.

For this reader attracted to honed writing of the sort Kraus typically rejects, I was seduced by the literary tone of the first section.

As someone who reads who favors honed writing of the variety that Kraus usually avoids, I was captivated by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. There is a fresh level of observation that accommodates trivial aspects, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like sweet treats". She tells Emma's narrative with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this different style could last out the book. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment those who appreciate polished prose have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her idol author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works returns in the central part. The protagonist is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between two different states, unable to aid her husband control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a world fueled by the hostility and dread that drives a political win. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on social media, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. On one occasion she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an America that her Twitter detractors would be unable to grasp, would not even see".

The Homicide Account

Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the referenced day experienced by the victim with the killer and his companions. Kraus has great source material, and knows hour by hour what transpired when the victim Brandon came to visit Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He sought a sexual encounter but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, loitering fixing his automobile and funding treats and narcotics, before being murdered by her romantic interest Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt develops an obsession by the account, and I found myself captivated by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and reckless transgression tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to go further into her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels oddly unfinished, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par