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The Four Spent the Day Together centers on individuals chasing after clean slates, trying to break free from substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into violence. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", rendering it willfully cynical through recurring use. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They opted for a clean break" recur in the story. Meanwhile, Kraus herself appears to be undertaking her own fresh start, as this presents as a new kind of book – documentarian, truly literary. Yet it reveals itself to be laden with the familiar conflicts and styles as past novels.

From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book

The writer started out as an artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as missives to a distant beloved, elevating confessional female writing from self-debasement into assassination. She continued writing, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels missed the power and directness that the epistolary style brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a nonconformist creator who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It follows that she now wants to explore different types of content, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a period in which she asserts that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature redundant.

Multiple Generations, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, encompassing multiple eras – none able to break free from their histories. We encounter the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, transitioning from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one directionless individual by another in a locality long abandoned by liberal ideals only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader fond of refined literature of the kind Kraus often avoids, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the first section.

Being a reader drawn to precise prose of the kind that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the first section. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates small details, like the bucket that the young Catt frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like hard candy". She tells the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "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 new voice could last out the book. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she echoes from her idol Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels comes back in the middle section. Catt is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while moving between Minnesota and LA, failing to help Paul control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between underfunded jobs as an substance abuse counselor in a environment fueled by the anger and fear that underpins an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her listed profession modified from "author" to "real estate holder" on a reference site. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she says that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she could potentially understand something about an the nation that her online critics would not understand, would overlook entirely".

The Killing Story

Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the referenced day spent by the victim with the killer and his associates. The author possesses excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He sought a sexual encounter but seems affably to have spent the day with her companions, mooching around having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner 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 story, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards ethical reporting and daring boundary-pushing clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who gains dimension in part due to the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par