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The Four Spent the Day Together features protagonists seeking clean slates, attempting to leave behind drugs or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into conflict. The author often employs the phrase "fresh start", rendering it intentionally weary through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He aimed to start over" and "They chose to begin anew" recur in the text. At the same time, Kraus herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, because this seems a novel form of writing – observational, truly literary. However it reveals itself to be laden with the familiar conflicts and approaches as earlier books.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

The writer started out as an artist who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming personal female narrative from abjection into assassination. She continued writing, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels lacked the power and directness that the correspondence format infused into the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her role as a maverick maker who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It follows that she now wants to try out different types of content, directing her gaze to the experiences of others, at a moment when she claims that current political era renders personal narrative redundant.

Three Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, encompassing three generations – none able to break free from their backgrounds. There is the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, moving from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a town mostly forsaken by progressive politics only a short distance from the protagonist's home in rural Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader fond of polished prose of the type Kraus typically rejects, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the first section.

As a reader who appreciates precise prose of the kind that the author often disregards, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the first section. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates trivial aspects, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she exclaims; "a nice toy", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". The author narrates Emma's story with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not entirely her own."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was destined to be disappointed when I hoped this different style could continue through the novel. Kraus says here that she dislikes the pleasure those who appreciate polished prose have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the unpolished style she echoes from her inspiration Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels reasserts itself in the second segment. The protagonist is attempting to do up multiple decrepit residences in the city's most challenging districts while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a environment fueled by the hostility and dread that powers an electoral success. A significant portion discusses about Catt being cancelled on social media, her professional designation altered from "author" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. In a moment she states that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would overlook entirely".

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 occurred as a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day with her companions, mooching around getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to go further into her own obsessions here. The standout figure is Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a struggling, neglected community. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par