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This latest work features individuals pursuing new beginnings, struggling to escape substance abuse or harmful partnerships, only to see hope turn into violence. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", making it willfully cynical through recurring use. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the narrative. And yet, the author herself seems to be making her own fresh start, because this seems a novel form of writing – observational, authentically narrative. Yet it proves to be packed with the recurring issues and styles as past novels.

From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book

The writer began as an creative who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting confessional female writing from abjection into rebellion. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels missed the impact and rawness that the letter form infused into the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a nonconformist creator who had become a major property owner, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It makes sense that she currently desires to try out new kinds of material, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a moment when she asserts that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature unnecessary.

Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, encompassing several time periods – none able to break free from their pasts. The book includes the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, versions of Kraus's parents, moving from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. There is the account of Kraus, in the character of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one troubled youth by another in a town long abandoned by progressive politics only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in rural Minnesota.

For this reader attracted to refined literature of the kind the author herself typically rejects, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the opening part.

As someone who reads who favors precise prose of the variety that Kraus herself often disregards, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the first section. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for minutiae, like the container that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, helped by her adored dad. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a nice toy", he replies, "the nuanced interpretations of terms rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". The author narrates Emma's story with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."

Frustration and Disruption

I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this different style could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the enjoyment audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works comes back in the middle section. Catt Greene is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as Paul moves between poorly supported positions as an addiction therapist in a environment driven by the hostility and dread that drives an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "author" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she could potentially understand something about an the nation that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".

The Murder Narrative

Thus we arrive to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day passed by the victim with the killer and his friends. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and knows hour by hour what transpired when 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 seems affably to have spent the day with her companions, mooching around getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by Brittney's partner Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing clash in this segment. Yet I wished her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels oddly unfinished, to the point that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par