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This latest work is populated with characters seeking fresh starts, trying to break free from addictions or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into violence. The author frequently uses the phrase "fresh start", rendering it deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the narrative. And yet, she seems to be making her own fresh start, because this presents as a different type of work – fact-based, truly literary. However it proves to be filled with the recurring issues and styles as past novels.

From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book

The writer was originally an visual artist who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating confessional female writing from abjection into assassination. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels lacked the impact and rawness that the epistolary style infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her role as a maverick maker who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It follows that she now wants to experiment with different types of content, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a period in which she claims that contemporary political climate turns intimate literature obsolete.

Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering several time periods – all unable to escape their backgrounds. The book includes the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, transitioning from the New York borough to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. Finally the story of the murder of one troubled youth by another in a community long abandoned by progressive politics only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.

For this reader attracted to refined literature of the kind Kraus often avoids, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the opening part.

As someone who reads who favors crafted language of the variety that Kraus often disregards, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. It possesses a novel degree of detail that allows space for trivial aspects, like the container that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, aided by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a nice toy", he replies, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like hard candy". She tells Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not entirely her own."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this fresh tone could continue through the novel. Kraus notes here that she resents the enjoyment audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to disruption, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her hero Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works comes back in the central part. The protagonist is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between two different states, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a world driven by the hostility and dread that powers an electoral success. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "author" to "landlord" on the online encyclopedia. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. In a moment she says that she's looking into the killing so that before leaving Minnesota, "she could potentially understand something about an America that her social media opponents would be unable to grasp, would not even see".

The Killing Story

So then we come to the actual killing – and the referenced day experienced by the murdered individual with the killer and his friends. Kraus utilizes excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what happened when the victim Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He sought a sexual encounter but seems amiably to have occupied the day with her companions, mooching around getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman spiraling out of control in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par