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The Four Spent the Day Together features characters pursuing clean slates, trying to break free from substance abuse or toxic relationships, only to witness hope devolve into violence. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", rendering it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the story. Meanwhile, Kraus herself is embarking on her own fresh start, because this presents as a new kind of book – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. However it turns out to be packed with the same dilemmas and approaches as past novels.

From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book

The writer began as an creative who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating confessional female writing from self-debasement into defiance. She continued writing, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the impact and rawness that the letter form infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a renegade artist who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It makes sense that she now wants to experiment with new kinds of material, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a time when she states that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing unnecessary.

Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering three generations – all unable to escape their histories. There is the tale of Emma and Jasper, versions of Kraus's parents, relocating from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband a man named Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one directionless individual by another in a locality long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from the protagonist's home in rural Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader drawn to refined literature of the sort Kraus typically rejects, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the first section.

As someone who reads drawn to crafted language of the style that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the literary tone of the first section. There is a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for small details, like the pail that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the opening of the book, helped by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a nice toy", he answers, "the nuanced interpretations of terms rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". She tells the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was fated to feel let down when I expected this different style could persist to the end. The author states here that she dislikes the pleasure readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disruption, to the unpolished style she has in common with her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels reasserts itself in the central part. Catt is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help her husband curb his addiction. She feels helpless as her spouse cycles through low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a world fueled by the rage and anxiety that drives a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on a platform, her occupation changed from "writer" to "real estate holder" on a reference site. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. At one point she states that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even perceive".

The Killing Story

Then we reach to the actual killing – and the titular day experienced by the deceased with the killer and his companions. Kraus utilizes great source material, and details moment by moment what occurred as the victim Brandon came to visit Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, loitering fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by her romantic interest Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt develops an obsession by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and daring boundary-pushing clash in this segment. Yet I wished her to explore more thoroughly her individual preoccupations here. The standout figure is Brittney, who gains dimension partly through Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par