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This latest work features characters chasing after fresh starts, attempting to leave behind addictions or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into conflict. Kraus often employs the phrase "fresh start", transforming it into willfully cynical through recurring use. Phrases such as "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the story. At the same time, the author herself appears to be undertaking her own fresh start, because this appears a new kind of book – documentarian, authentically narrative. Yet it turns out to be filled with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as past novels.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

The writer started out as an visual artist who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating intimate women's literature from abjection into rebellion. She kept producing books, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the power and directness that the correspondence format infused into the voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her position as a nonconformist creator who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It follows that she now wants to try out fresh narrative sources, turning outward to the experiences of others, at a time when she asserts that current political era makes confessional writing obsolete.

Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, spanning three generations – each trapped by their pasts. We encounter the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, moving from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. Additionally the account of Kraus, in the character of Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction her husband Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a town largely deserted by progressive politics only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader fond of polished prose of the kind Kraus typically rejects, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the opening part.

Being a reader drawn to crafted language of the style that Kraus often disregards, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the initial part. It exhibits a fresh level of observation that makes room for small details, like the container that the protagonist as a child dislodges from ice at the start of the story, aided by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a nice toy", he answers, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like piece candy". Kraus writes the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."

Frustration and Disruption

I was fated to feel let down when I wished this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the enjoyment readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she has in common with her idol Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her past books reasserts itself in the second segment. Catt is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between poorly supported positions as an recovery specialist in a environment propelled by the rage and anxiety that drives a political win. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on social media, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she says that she's investigating the murder so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an America that her social media opponents would fail to comprehend, would not even perceive".

The Homicide Account

So then we come to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day passed by the deceased with the perpetrator and his associates. The author possesses excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He sought a sexual encounter but seems amiably to have occupied 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 her romantic interest a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt develops an obsession by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par