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The new book is populated with protagonists seeking clean slates, struggling to escape drugs or harmful partnerships, only to see hope turn into aggression. Kraus frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", making it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" appear throughout the text. Meanwhile, she is embarking on her personal new beginning, because this seems a different type of work – fact-based, truly literary. Yet it turns out to be packed with the recurring issues and approaches as earlier books.

From Chance Novelist to Iconic Work

The writer began as an visual artist who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating personal female narrative from humiliation into defiance. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels missed the power and directness that the correspondence format infused into the voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a nonconformist creator who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It follows that she currently desires to try out new kinds of material, looking outwards to external narratives, at a time when she asserts that current political era makes confessional writing redundant.

Three Generations, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, encompassing several time periods – all unable to escape their histories. The book includes the tale of Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, transitioning from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a community mostly forsaken by progressive politics only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.

From my perspective as a reader fond of polished prose of the sort Kraus herself often avoids, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the first section.

As a reader who appreciates precise prose of the variety that the author usually avoids, I was captivated by the storytelling approach of the first section. It possesses a novel degree of detail that allows space for trivial aspects, like the pail that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the start of the story, helped by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a great plaything", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not entirely her own."

Frustration and Disruption

I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this fresh tone could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the pleasure audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works returns in the central part. Catt Greene is attempting to do up multiple decrepit residences in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid her husband manage his alcohol use. She experiences powerlessness as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a society driven by the anger and fear that underpins a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on social media, her professional designation altered from "author" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she states that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".

The Murder Narrative

So then we come to the actual killing – and the titular day passed by the murdered individual with the murderer and his associates. Kraus utilizes compelling foundational content, and details moment by moment what happened when the victim Brandon came to visit Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression clash in this segment. Yet I wished her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the point that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par