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This latest work features characters pursuing new beginnings, trying to break free from drugs or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into violence. Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", making it deliberately jaded through recurring use. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" appear throughout the text. And yet, the author herself seems to be making her own fresh start, as this presents as a different type of work – documentarian, authentically narrative. However it turns out to be filled with the recurring issues and aesthetics as her previous works.

From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic

The writer started out as an creative who transitioned to writing unintentionally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming confessional female writing from abjection into rebellion. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the power and directness that the correspondence format brought to the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her position as a maverick maker who had turned into a extensive real estate holder, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It follows that she presently aims to experiment with fresh narrative sources, directing her gaze to the experiences of others, at a period in which she states that Trumpian politics makes confessional writing unnecessary.

Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing three generations – none able to break free from their pasts. There is the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, transitioning from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a town long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.

From my perspective as a reader attracted to honed writing of the sort Kraus tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the opening part.

As a reader who appreciates honed writing of the style that the author usually avoids, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. There is a novel degree of detail that makes room for minutiae, like the bucket that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the start of the story, helped by her cherished parent. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". She tells Emma's story with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not entirely her own."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was fated to feel let down when I expected this new voice could last out the book. The author states here that she dislikes the pleasure readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she has in common with her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works comes back in the central part. The protagonist is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while shuttling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help Paul manage his alcohol use. She is overwhelmed as Paul cycles through poorly supported positions as an substance abuse counselor in a world fueled by the anger and fear that powers a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her occupation changed from "novelist" to "landlord" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she says that she's looking into the killing so that before leaving Minnesota, "she might be able to learn something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would fail to comprehend, would not even see".

The Killing Story

So then we come to the murder itself – and the eponymous day spent by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his companions. Kraus has compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what happened when the victim Brandon came to see Brittney after connecting via an application where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day in the company of her associates, wandering about fixing his automobile and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

Catt develops an obsession by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to go further into her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who becomes vivid partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par