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The Four Spent the Day Together features individuals pursuing clean slates, struggling to escape addictions or toxic relationships, only to see hope turn into conflict. The author frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", rendering it intentionally weary through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the text. At the same time, she is embarking on her personal new beginning, since this seems a new kind of book – fact-based, truly literary. But then it turns out to be packed with the recurring issues and aesthetics as her previous works.

From Chance Novelist to Iconic Work

Kraus began as an visual artist who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, elevating intimate women's literature from abjection into assassination. She continued writing, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels missed the shock and immediacy that the letter form infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her role as a renegade artist who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It is logical that she currently desires to explore different types of content, turning outward to the experiences of others, at a period in which she states that current political era makes confessional writing unnecessary.

Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering several time periods – all unable to escape their backgrounds. There is the story of characters Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, transitioning from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. Finally the story of the murder of one directionless individual by another in a town mostly forsaken by progressive politics only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.

From my perspective as a reader attracted to refined literature of the sort Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the narrative style of the initial segment.

Being a reader who favors crafted language of the kind that the author often disregards, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the initial part. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for small details, like the bucket that the young Catt frees from the ice at the start of the story, aided by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a great plaything", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language rolling around in their mouths like hard candy". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this different style could persist to the end. The author states here that she resents the satisfaction readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the unpolished style she echoes from her hero Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her earlier works comes back in the central part. Catt is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between Minnesota and LA, unsuccessful in assisting Paul manage his alcohol use. She is overwhelmed as her spouse transitions between poorly supported positions as an addiction therapist in a world propelled by the rage and anxiety that drives a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "author" to "landlord" on a reference site. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. At one point she states that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her online critics would not understand, would overlook entirely".

The Homicide Account

So then we come to the murder itself – and the referenced day spent by the deceased with the killer and his associates. Kraus has great source material, and knows hour by hour what transpired when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, mooching around having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by her romantic interest Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who becomes vivid partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman derailing in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par