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This latest work is populated with protagonists chasing after clean slates, attempting to leave behind drugs or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into conflict. Kraus often employs the phrase "fresh start", rendering it willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They chose to begin anew" recur in the story. Meanwhile, Kraus herself is embarking on her individual reinvention, since this seems a novel form of writing – documentarian, authentically narrative. But then it proves to be filled with the recurring issues and styles as earlier books.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

Kraus began as an creative who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, transforming confessional female writing from abjection into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format infused into the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her role as a nonconformist creator who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on real estate deals. It makes sense that she currently desires to explore fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a time when she claims that current political era makes confessional writing unnecessary.

Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing three generations – all unable to escape their backgrounds. There is the story of characters Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, relocating from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. Additionally the account of Kraus, in the persona of Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a community long abandoned by liberal ideals only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.

As a reader drawn to refined literature of the kind Kraus herself often avoids, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the first section.

Being a reader who favors precise prose of the kind that Kraus often disregards, I was won over by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. There is a novel degree of detail that makes room for small details, like the container that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her adored dad. "I found an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a great plaything", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". She tells Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was destined to be disappointed when I wished this different style could continue through the novel. Kraus says here that she resents the enjoyment audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she has in common with her hero author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels reasserts itself in the central part. The protagonist is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between Minnesota and LA, unable to aid her husband manage his alcohol use. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a environment propelled by the anger and fear that powers a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "property owner" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she says that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she might be able to learn something about an America that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would not even see".

The Murder Narrative

Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day spent by the deceased with the perpetrator and his associates. Kraus has excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what transpired when the victim Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day in the company of her associates, mooching around fixing his automobile and funding treats and narcotics, before being murdered by Brittney's partner Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who gains dimension in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par