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The Four Spent the Day Together features characters chasing after new beginnings, struggling to escape addictions or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into conflict. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", rendering it deliberately jaded through recurring use. Phrases such as "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They opted for a clean break" recur in the story. At the same time, she seems to be making her individual reinvention, as this seems a new kind of book – fact-based, authentically narrative. Yet it proves to be laden with the familiar conflicts and approaches as earlier books.

From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book

Kraus was originally an artist who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, converting personal female narrative from abjection into defiance. She kept producing books, but the following three fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the power and directness that the letter form infused into the tone 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 property transactions. It makes sense that she now wants to try out different types of content, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a period in which she asserts that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing redundant.

Three Generations, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning several time periods – each trapped by their backgrounds. The book includes the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, relocating from the urban environment to a pastoral setting. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a town mostly forsaken by liberal ideals only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.

For this reader fond of polished prose of the sort the author herself typically rejects, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the opening part.

As a reader who appreciates precise prose of the kind that Kraus tends to eschew, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the first section. It exhibits a fresh level of observation that allows space for minutiae, like the pail that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her cherished parent. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a nice toy", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words rolling around in their mouths like hard candy". Kraus writes Emma's story with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."

Frustration and Disruption

I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this fresh tone could last out the book. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the satisfaction those who appreciate polished prose have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels comes back in the central part. The protagonist is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a world propelled by the hostility and dread that powers Trump's victory. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her listed profession modified from "writer" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. In a moment she states that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she could potentially understand something about an America that her online critics would not understand, would overlook entirely".

The Murder Narrative

So then we come to the actual killing – and the referenced day passed by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his friends. The author possesses great source material, and knows hour by hour what transpired when the victim Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He sought a sexual encounter but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, mooching around getting his car mended and funding treats and narcotics, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and reckless transgression tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partly through Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par