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The Four Spent the Day Together features characters chasing after fresh starts, trying to break free from substance abuse or harmful partnerships, only to see hope turn into aggression. The author often employs the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into intentionally weary through recurring use. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They chose to begin anew" recur in the text. And yet, she is embarking on her own fresh start, since this presents as a different type of work – fact-based, truly literary. Yet it proves to be packed with the familiar conflicts and approaches as past novels.

From Accidental Writer to Iconic Work

The writer began as an artist who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, transforming confessional female writing from humiliation into defiance. She kept producing books, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the impact and rawness that the correspondence format infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a renegade artist who had evolved into a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It is logical that she currently desires to explore new kinds of material, turning outward to external narratives, at a period in which she asserts that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative unnecessary.

Several Eras, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, encompassing multiple eras – all unable to escape their histories. There is the tale of Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, relocating from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband a man named Paul. Finally the story of the murder of one troubled youth by another in a town long abandoned by liberal ideals only a short distance from Catt's cottage in a remote part of Minnesota.

As a reader attracted to polished prose of the type Kraus typically rejects, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the opening part.

As someone who reads who favors crafted language of the style that the author usually avoids, I was won over by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. It possesses a novel degree of detail that accommodates trivial aspects, like the pail that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, aided by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". The author narrates Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this fresh tone could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she dislikes the satisfaction readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her idol author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her earlier works comes back in the central part. Catt Greene is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments 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 Paul cycles through underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a environment propelled by the hostility and dread that drives a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on a platform, her professional designation altered from "author" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she says that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even perceive".

The Killing Story

So then we come to the homicide in question – and the referenced day experienced by the victim with the killer and his friends. The author possesses excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what transpired when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day in the company of her associates, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to go further into her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who comes alive partially because of Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. This entire part feels oddly unfinished, to the point that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par