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The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with characters chasing after fresh starts, attempting to leave behind addictions or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", rendering it deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the text. And yet, she appears to be undertaking her individual reinvention, since this presents as a novel form of writing – observational, authentically narrative. But then it turns out to be packed with the same dilemmas and approaches as past novels.

From Chance Novelist to Iconic Work

Kraus began as an artist who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, converting intimate women's literature from abjection into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the following three compelling and abrasive novels missed the impact and rawness that the epistolary style brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her position as a maverick maker who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It is logical that she presently aims to try out fresh narrative sources, directing her gaze to the experiences of others, at a time when she states that Trumpian politics makes confessional writing redundant.

Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering three generations – none able to break free from their backgrounds. We encounter the story of characters Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, moving from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction a man named Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one directionless individual by another in a community mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader attracted to honed writing of the sort the author herself tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the opening part.

As a reader who favors precise prose of the variety that Kraus often disregards, I was captivated by the literary tone of the opening segment. It exhibits a fresh level of observation that allows space for minutiae, like the pail that the young Catt frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a lovely toy", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like sweet treats". The author narrates Emma's story with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."

Frustration and Disruption

I was fated to feel let down when I wished this fresh tone could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the satisfaction readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works returns in the second segment. The protagonist is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid Paul control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a environment propelled by the hostility and dread that drives an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her occupation changed from "writer" to "landlord" on the online encyclopedia. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she says that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her social media opponents would not understand, would overlook entirely".

The Killing Story

So then we come to the murder itself – and the eponymous day passed by the victim with the killer and his companions. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what occurred as a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, wandering about getting his car mended and funding treats and narcotics, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par