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This latest work features characters chasing after fresh starts, trying to break free from substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", making it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the story. And yet, Kraus herself appears to be undertaking her individual reinvention, as this seems a new kind of book – fact-based, authentically narrative. But then it turns out to be packed with the familiar conflicts and styles as her previous works.

From Accidental Writer to Iconic Work

Kraus started out as an creative who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as missives to a distant beloved, elevating confessional female writing from abjection into assassination. She continued writing, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the impact and rawness that the epistolary style brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a nonconformist creator who had evolved into a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It makes sense that she now wants to experiment with different types of content, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a time when she claims that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative redundant.

Several Eras, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing multiple eras – none able to break free from their pasts. We encounter the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, relocating from the New York borough to the Connecticut countryside. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the late recognition of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband her husband Paul. Finally the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a community largely deserted by liberal ideals only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.

For this reader fond of polished prose of the kind Kraus tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the first section.

As someone who reads who favors crafted language of the style that Kraus herself often disregards, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. It possesses a novel degree of detail that allows space for trivial aspects, like the bucket that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the opening of the book, assisted by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a nice toy", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". The author narrates Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."

Frustration and Disruption

I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this different style could last out the book. The author states here that she is annoyed by the pleasure readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she echoes from her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books reasserts itself in the middle section. Catt is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between two different states, unable to aid Paul manage his alcohol use. She is overwhelmed as her spouse cycles through low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a world driven by the rage and anxiety that powers an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "landlord" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she remarks that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she might be able to learn something about an the nation that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would not even see".

The Killing Story

So then we come to the actual killing – and the referenced day spent by the deceased with the killer and his companions. The author possesses excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what occurred as a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He sought a sexual encounter but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being murdered by Brittney's partner Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for aggressive outbursts.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt develops an obsession by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par