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The Four Spent the Day Together features individuals seeking clean slates, attempting to leave behind drugs or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. The author frequently uses the phrase "new beginning", making it willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" recur in the narrative. And yet, the author herself appears to be undertaking her personal new beginning, as this presents as a novel form of writing – documentarian, truly literary. Yet it reveals itself to be packed with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as past novels.

From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book

Kraus started out as an visual artist who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting confessional female writing from humiliation into rebellion. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels missed the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a maverick maker who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on housing investments. It is logical that she now wants to try out new kinds of material, directing her gaze to other people's stories, at a moment when she claims that current political era makes confessional writing redundant.

Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing three generations – each trapped by their histories. There is the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, transitioning from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a locality long abandoned by progressive politics only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.

As a reader attracted to honed writing of the sort Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the narrative style of the opening part.

Being a reader drawn to honed writing of the kind that the author usually avoids, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that allows space for trivial aspects, like the container that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the opening of the book, helped by her cherished parent. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a great plaything", he answers, "the nuanced interpretations of terms rolling around in their mouths like hard candy". The author narrates Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not entirely her own."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was fated to feel let down when I expected this fresh tone could continue through the novel. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the enjoyment readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to disruption, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her hero Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels returns in the second segment. Catt Greene is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting Paul control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as Paul transitions between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a world driven by the hostility and dread that powers an electoral success. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on social media, her listed profession modified from "author" to "real estate holder" on a reference site. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she says that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her online critics would not understand, would not even perceive".

The Homicide Account

Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the titular day experienced by the deceased with the perpetrator and his friends. Kraus utilizes compelling foundational content, and knows hour by hour what occurred as the victim Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she offered adult photos. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day with her companions, mooching around fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt develops an obsession by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The standout figure is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partly through Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par