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The Four Spent the Day Together centers on protagonists seeking fresh starts, attempting to leave behind drugs or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into conflict. The author frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the text. At the same time, she is embarking on her personal new beginning, because this seems a new kind of book – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. However it turns out to be filled with the familiar conflicts and styles as earlier books.

From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book

Kraus started out as an visual artist who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating intimate women's literature from abjection into defiance. She continued writing, but the following three compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the power and directness that the epistolary style brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her role as a renegade artist who had become a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It is logical that she currently desires to explore different types of content, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a moment when she claims that Trumpian politics makes confessional writing redundant.

Multiple Generations, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, spanning three generations – all unable to escape their pasts. The book includes the story of Emma and Jasper, versions of Kraus's parents, moving from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. Additionally the narrative of the author, in the guise of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband a man named Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a community long abandoned by progressive politics only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in a remote part of Minnesota.

For this reader attracted to honed writing of the sort the author herself tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the first section.

As a reader drawn to precise prose of the style that Kraus tends to eschew, I was seduced by the literary tone of the opening segment. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for trivial aspects, like the container that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, helped by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words rolling around in their mouths like sweet treats". The author narrates Emma's narrative with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was destined to be disappointed when I wished this fresh tone could last out the book. Kraus says here that she resents the pleasure readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her idol author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels reasserts itself in the second segment. Catt Greene is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while moving between two different states, unsuccessful in assisting Paul control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as Paul moves between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a world driven by the rage and anxiety that drives an electoral success. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on social media, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "landlord" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. On one occasion she says that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she could potentially understand something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even perceive".

The Homicide Account

Thus we arrive to the actual killing – and the titular day experienced by the victim with the killer and his companions. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she offered adult photos. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, mooching around fixing his automobile and funding treats and narcotics, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend 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 story, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who comes alive partially because of Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par