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The Four Spent the Day Together features characters pursuing clean slates, struggling to escape substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into violence. The author often employs the phrase "new beginning", transforming it into willfully cynical through recurring use. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" appear throughout the text. And yet, she seems to be making her personal new beginning, because this seems a novel form of writing – observational, authentically narrative. Yet it proves to be laden with the same dilemmas and styles as earlier books.

From Accidental Writer to Iconic Work

Kraus was originally an creative who transitioned to writing unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, converting personal female narrative from abjection into defiance. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a nonconformist creator who had turned into a extensive real estate holder, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It follows that she now wants to explore different types of content, turning outward to the experiences of others, at a period in which she claims that current political era renders personal narrative obsolete.

Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, spanning three generations – none able to break free from their histories. There is the story of characters Emma and Jasper, versions of Kraus's parents, moving from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her partner struggling with addiction a man named Paul. Finally the narrative of a homicide of one directionless individual by another in a community long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.

As a reader attracted to refined literature of the kind Kraus tends to eschew, I was captivated by the narrative style of the opening part.

As a reader who favors crafted language of the style that Kraus herself often disregards, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. It possesses a novel degree of detail that makes room for small details, like the pail that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the opening of the book, helped by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a nice toy", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like hard candy". She tells 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 hoped this different style could last out the book. The author states here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the unpolished style she shares with her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works comes back in the second segment. Catt is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while shuttling between two different states, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul transitions between low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a society driven by the rage and anxiety that underpins Trump's victory. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on social media, her occupation changed from "author" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she says that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would fail to comprehend, would not even see".

The Homicide Account

Thus we arrive to the actual killing – and the titular day experienced by the victim with the perpetrator and his companions. Kraus utilizes compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what happened when a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after connecting via an application where she offered adult photos. He sought a sexual encounter but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, wandering about fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and reckless transgression clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to go further into her own obsessions 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 troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par