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The Four Spent the Day Together centers on protagonists chasing after clean slates, attempting to leave behind drugs or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into aggression. The author frequently uses the phrase "fresh start", rendering it willfully cynical through recurring use. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" recur in the text. And yet, the author herself is embarking on her individual reinvention, since this appears a new kind of book – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. However it reveals itself to be laden with the recurring issues and approaches as earlier books.

From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book

Kraus began as an artist who entered the literary world somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, converting confessional female writing from humiliation into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the letter form infused into the voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a nonconformist creator who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It follows that she now wants to explore new kinds of material, directing her gaze to the experiences of others, at a time when she claims that current political era renders personal narrative obsolete.

Several Eras, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, encompassing several time periods – none able to break free from their backgrounds. We encounter the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, relocating from the Bronx to a pastoral setting. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband Paul. The third thread involves the story of the murder of one directionless individual by another in a community largely deserted by liberal ideals only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.

For this reader attracted to refined literature of the sort Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the narrative style of the first section.

As someone who reads who favors precise prose of the kind that the author tends to eschew, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the first section. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for trivial aspects, like the pail that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the start of the story, helped by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a nice toy", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like sweet treats". The author narrates Emma's narrative with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not entirely her own."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this different style could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she dislikes the enjoyment readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to disruption, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels returns in the middle section. The protagonist is attempting to do up multiple decrepit residences in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between two different states, unable to aid her husband manage his alcohol use. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between poorly supported positions as an addiction therapist in a environment driven by the hostility and dread that underpins a political win. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "property owner" on a reference site. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she says that she's looking into the killing so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn something about an America that her social media opponents would fail to comprehend, would not even see".

The Homicide Account

Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the titular day experienced by the victim with the killer and his associates. The author possesses great source material, and details moment by moment what happened when the victim Brandon came to meet 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 getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and reckless transgression tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par