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This latest work is populated with protagonists seeking fresh starts, struggling to escape drugs or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. The author often employs the phrase "clean slate", rendering it willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the narrative. Meanwhile, she is embarking on her own fresh start, as this appears a different type of work – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. But then it turns out to be filled with the same dilemmas and styles as earlier books.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

The writer started out as an artist who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, converting personal female narrative from abjection into assassination. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels missed the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style imparted to the voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a maverick maker who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on real estate deals. It is logical that she now wants to try out fresh narrative sources, turning outward to external narratives, at a period in which she asserts that Trumpian politics renders personal narrative unnecessary.

Three Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering three generations – all unable to escape their pasts. There is the tale of characters Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, relocating from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a community long abandoned by liberal ideals only 80 miles from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.

From my perspective as a reader drawn to polished prose of the kind Kraus typically rejects, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the initial segment.

As a reader drawn to crafted language of the kind that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was won over by the literary tone of the opening segment. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for small details, like the container that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a great plaything", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language rolling around in their mouths like sweet treats". She tells the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was destined to be disappointed when I hoped this different style could continue through the novel. The author states here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment those who appreciate polished prose have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disruption, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works comes back in the second segment. Catt is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between two different states, failing to help Paul control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as her spouse transitions between underfunded jobs as an substance abuse counselor in a society driven by the hostility and dread that underpins Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. In a moment she says that she's investigating the murder so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would be unable to grasp, would not even see".

The Killing Story

Thus we arrive to the actual killing – and the referenced day passed by the murdered individual with the murderer and his friends. Kraus has compelling foundational content, and details moment by moment what occurred as the victim Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day in the company of her associates, loitering having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl spiraling out of control in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par