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The Four Spent the Day Together centers on characters seeking fresh starts, struggling to escape drugs or toxic relationships, only to see hope turn into aggression. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", making it deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" recur in the text. And yet, the author herself appears to be undertaking her own fresh start, as this seems a different type of work – documentarian, truly literary. Yet it proves to be packed with the recurring issues and approaches as earlier books.

From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book

The writer was originally an creative who entered the literary world somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as missives to a distant beloved, converting intimate women's literature from self-debasement into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the impact and rawness that the epistolary style brought to the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a renegade artist who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It makes sense that she currently desires to explore fresh narrative sources, turning outward to external narratives, at a time when she states that Trumpian politics makes confessional writing redundant.

Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering several time periods – all unable to escape their backgrounds. There is the tale of Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, relocating from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. There is the account of Kraus, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a locality mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.

From my perspective as a reader attracted to polished prose of the sort Kraus typically rejects, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the opening part.

As someone who reads who favors precise prose of the variety that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the literary tone of the first section. There is a fresh level of observation that allows space for minutiae, like the container that the young Catt frees from the ice at the opening of the book, assisted by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like piece candy". She tells the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this new voice could continue through the novel. The author states here that she resents the satisfaction readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her hero author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works returns in the central part. Catt is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while moving between Minnesota and LA, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a environment fueled by the anger and fear that powers a political win. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her professional designation altered from "author" to "real estate holder" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to be overly concerned about this. In a moment she states that she's investigating the murder so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even see".

The Killing Story

So then we come to the homicide in question – and the referenced day spent by the murdered individual with the murderer and his companions. The author possesses excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what occurred as a man named Brandon came to meet 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 in the company of her associates, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has repeatedly received inpatient care for aggressive outbursts.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who gains dimension partly through the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par