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The new book is populated with protagonists pursuing fresh starts, attempting to leave behind substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into violence. Kraus often employs the phrase "fresh start", transforming it into intentionally weary through recurring use. Phrases such as "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the text. Meanwhile, she appears to be undertaking her own fresh start, since this seems a different type of work – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. However it reveals itself to be filled with the familiar conflicts and styles as earlier books.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

Kraus started out as an creative who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as epistles to an unresponsive love interest, transforming personal female narrative from self-debasement into assassination. She kept producing books, but the following three engaging and challenging novels lacked the impact and rawness that the letter form infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a nonconformist creator who had evolved into a major property owner, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It follows that she currently desires to experiment with new kinds of material, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a moment when she states that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative redundant.

Three Generations, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, encompassing multiple eras – each trapped by their pasts. There is the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, moving from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. There is the account of Kraus, in the guise of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband a man named Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one directionless individual by another in a locality mostly forsaken by liberal ideals only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.

From my perspective as a reader drawn to polished prose of the type Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the opening part.

As someone who reads drawn to precise prose of the variety that Kraus tends to eschew, I was captivated by the literary tone of the first section. There is a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for small details, like the pail that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the start of the story, helped by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a great plaything", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths 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."

Frustration and Disruption

I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this new voice could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the satisfaction audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disruption, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels comes back in the central part. The protagonist is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help Paul manage his alcohol use. She feels helpless as Paul transitions between poorly supported positions as an addiction therapist in a world propelled by the hostility and dread that drives an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she remarks that she's investigating the murder so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn something about an America that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even see".

The Murder Narrative

Then we reach to the actual killing – and the eponymous day passed by the deceased with the killer and his friends. The author possesses excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, wandering about getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. However, I would have preferred her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The standout figure is Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels oddly unfinished, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par