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This latest work features protagonists chasing after fresh starts, attempting to leave behind drugs or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into conflict. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", making it willfully cynical through recurring use. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the narrative. Meanwhile, she seems to be making her personal new beginning, since this appears a different type of work – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. But then it reveals itself to be filled with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as past novels.

From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic

Kraus started out as an creative who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating confessional female writing from humiliation into assassination. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the letter form infused into the voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her role as a renegade artist who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It follows that she currently desires to experiment with fresh narrative sources, turning outward to external narratives, at a period in which she asserts that current political era makes confessional writing redundant.

Three Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering several time periods – all unable to escape their histories. The book includes the narrative about Emma and Jasper, representations of Kraus's parents, relocating from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the character of Catt Greene, confronting the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a town largely deserted by liberal ideals only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader drawn to honed writing of the sort Kraus herself often avoids, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the first section.

Being a reader drawn to honed writing of the style that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the literary tone of the first section. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for trivial aspects, like the container that the young Catt dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was fated to feel let down when I expected this fresh tone could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the satisfaction readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books comes back in the central part. The protagonist is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in the city's most challenging districts while moving between Minnesota and LA, failing to help Paul manage his alcohol use. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a world propelled by the anger and fear that underpins an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on social media, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "landlord" on a reference site. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. On one occasion she states that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she could potentially understand something about an the nation that her online critics would not understand, would not even perceive".

The Killing Story

So then we come to the homicide in question – and the referenced day spent by the deceased with the killer and his companions. Kraus has compelling foundational content, and details moment by moment what happened when a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after connecting via an application where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day in the company of her associates, wandering about fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt develops an obsession by the narrative, and I found myself captivated by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who becomes vivid partially because of the protagonist's connection to her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par