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The Four Spent the Day Together centers on protagonists chasing after fresh starts, attempting to leave behind substance abuse or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into conflict. Kraus often employs the phrase "new beginning", rendering it deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" recur in the narrative. And yet, she seems to be making her personal new beginning, because this appears a different type of work – fact-based, truly literary. Yet it turns out to be laden with the familiar conflicts and styles as past novels.

From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book

Kraus was originally an visual artist who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, converting personal female narrative from humiliation into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the impact and rawness that the epistolary style brought to the voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a renegade artist who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on real estate deals. It follows that she presently aims to experiment with different types of content, directing her gaze to other people's stories, at a moment when she claims that current political era renders personal narrative obsolete.

Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering three generations – all unable to escape their histories. We encounter the tale of characters Emma and Jasper, versions of Kraus's parents, transitioning from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a town mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.

For this reader fond of honed writing of the sort the author herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the literary tone of the first section.

As a reader who favors crafted language of the style that the author tends to eschew, I was won over by the literary tone of the opening segment. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for small details, like the bucket that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the start of the story, aided by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a nice toy", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like piece candy". She tells the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the satisfaction audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disruption, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her idol Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works reasserts itself in the second segment. Catt is working on refurbishing multiple decrepit residences in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid her husband manage his alcohol use. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a environment driven by the rage and anxiety that underpins an electoral success. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on social media, her occupation changed from "writer" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. At one point she says that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an America that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even see".

The Killing Story

Thus we arrive to the homicide in question – and the referenced day experienced by the murdered individual with the killer and his companions. The author possesses great source 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 marketed explicit images. He sought a sexual encounter but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, mooching around getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by Brittney's partner Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who gains dimension partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par