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The new book is populated with characters pursuing clean slates, attempting to leave behind drugs or toxic relationships, only to witness hope devolve into violence. The author often employs the phrase "new beginning", transforming it into intentionally weary through its repetitions. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the narrative. Meanwhile, the author herself is embarking on her personal new beginning, because this seems a novel form of writing – observational, genuinely novelistic. But then it turns out to be filled with the familiar conflicts and approaches as earlier books.

From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic

Kraus started out as an artist who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating personal female narrative from humiliation into defiance. She kept producing books, but the following three engaging and challenging novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style brought to the voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a renegade artist who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on real estate deals. It follows that she presently aims to experiment with fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to external narratives, at a moment when she states that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative obsolete.

Three Generations, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering three generations – none able to break free from their histories. We encounter the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, representations of Kraus's parents, relocating from the New York borough to the Connecticut countryside. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her partner struggling with addiction a man named Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a community long abandoned by progressive politics only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.

As a reader fond of polished prose of the sort the author herself typically rejects, I was captivated by the literary tone of the first section.

As someone who reads who favors honed writing of the variety that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was captivated by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. There is a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for small details, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the start of the story, assisted by her cherished parent. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language 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."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was fated to feel let down when I expected this new voice could continue through the novel. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the satisfaction those who appreciate polished prose have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books comes back in the middle section. Catt Greene is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between Minnesota and LA, unable to aid Paul control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as her spouse cycles through low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a world propelled by the hostility and dread that drives Trump's victory. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on social media, her occupation changed from "author" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. At one point she says that she's looking into the killing so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would fail to comprehend, would not even see".

The Killing Story

So then we come to the actual killing – and the eponymous day passed by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his friends. The author possesses excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what transpired when Brandon came to see Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, wandering about getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and daring boundary-pushing wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par