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The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with characters pursuing new beginnings, trying to break free from substance abuse or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into aggression. The author often employs the phrase "new beginning", transforming it into deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the story. Meanwhile, the author herself is embarking on her own fresh start, because this presents as a new kind of book – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. However it proves to be packed with the familiar conflicts and approaches as earlier books.

From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book

Kraus started out as an creative who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, converting confessional female writing from abjection into defiance. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels missed the power and directness that the letter form infused into the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her position as a maverick maker who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It is logical that she currently desires to try out different types of content, turning outward to external narratives, at a time when she states that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative obsolete.

Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering several time periods – none able to break free from their backgrounds. We encounter the tale of Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, relocating from the urban environment to a pastoral setting. There is the narrative of the author, in the guise of Catt Greene, confronting the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. Finally the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a locality largely deserted by progressive politics only a short distance from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.

As a reader attracted to refined literature of the kind Kraus tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the initial segment.

Being a reader who appreciates honed writing of the kind that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the first section. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates minutiae, like the pail that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, assisted by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a great plaything", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like piece candy". She tells Emma's story with interest and closeness. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not entirely her own."

Frustration and Disruption

I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this fresh tone could last out the book. Kraus says here that she dislikes the enjoyment readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she has in common with her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels returns in the second segment. The protagonist is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between two different states, unsuccessful in assisting her husband control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as her spouse moves between poorly supported positions as an recovery specialist in a environment propelled by the hostility and dread that drives Trump's victory. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on social media, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. At one point she states that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an the United States that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even see".

The Homicide Account

Then we reach to the actual killing – and the eponymous day passed by the victim with the murderer and his companions. Kraus has great source material, and knows hour by hour what happened when the victim Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He sought a sexual encounter but seems amiably to have occupied the day in the company of her associates, wandering about getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and reckless transgression tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to go further into her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who gains dimension partly through the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par