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The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with protagonists seeking clean slates, struggling to escape substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into violence. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", transforming it into deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the story. Meanwhile, the author herself appears to be undertaking her personal new beginning, because this appears a novel form of writing – fact-based, truly literary. However it proves to be packed with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as earlier books.

From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic

Kraus was originally an visual artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating intimate women's literature from abjection into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the letter form brought to the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a renegade artist who had evolved into a extensive real estate holder, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It follows that she now wants to explore fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to external narratives, at a period in which she claims that Trumpian politics renders personal narrative redundant.

Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering multiple eras – each trapped by their pasts. There is the tale of Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, moving from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. There is the narrative of the author, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband Paul. The third thread involves the story of the murder of one troubled youth by another in a locality mostly forsaken by progressive politics only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader fond of refined literature of the type the author herself typically rejects, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.

As a reader drawn to crafted language of the style that the author tends to eschew, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. There is a novel degree of detail that accommodates trivial aspects, like the pail that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the opening of the book, helped by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a great plaything", he replies, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like hard candy". The author narrates Emma's story with interest and closeness. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this new voice could last out the book. The author states here that she resents the satisfaction audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the unpolished style she has in common with her idol author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels comes back in the middle section. Catt is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between two different states, unsuccessful in assisting her husband curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a environment fueled by the hostility and dread that powers an electoral success. A significant portion discusses about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her occupation changed from "writer" to "landlord" on a reference site. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. In a moment she states that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an America that her social media opponents would not understand, would not even perceive".

The Homicide Account

Then we reach to the murder itself – and the titular day experienced by the deceased with the perpetrator and his associates. The author possesses great source material, and details moment by moment what happened when the victim Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she offered adult photos. He sought a sexual encounter but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, mooching around having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being shot by Brittney's partner Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.

Fascination and Incompletion

The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I found myself captivated by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing wrestle in this part. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par