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This latest work centers on protagonists chasing after clean slates, struggling to escape substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", making it deliberately jaded through recurring use. Phrases such as "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the narrative. Meanwhile, she is embarking on her personal new beginning, as this presents as a new kind of book – documentarian, truly literary. However it proves to be laden with the same dilemmas and approaches as her previous works.

From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book

Kraus started out as an visual artist who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, structured as missives to a distant beloved, transforming confessional female writing from self-debasement into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the following three fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the power and directness that the epistolary style brought to the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a maverick maker who had become a major property owner, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It follows that she currently desires to explore fresh narrative sources, directing her gaze to other people's stories, at a time when she asserts that contemporary political climate turns intimate literature obsolete.

Several Eras, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering several time periods – none able to break free from their pasts. The book includes the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, versions of Kraus's parents, transitioning from the Bronx to a pastoral setting. Additionally the account of Kraus, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a locality largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.

For this reader drawn to refined literature of the kind Kraus herself typically rejects, I was seduced by the literary tone of the initial segment.

As someone who reads drawn to precise prose of the variety that Kraus usually avoids, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. It possesses a fresh level of observation that allows space for trivial aspects, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". She tells Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."

Frustration and Disruption

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 those who appreciate polished prose have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books returns in the central part. Catt is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between two different states, unsuccessful in assisting Paul manage his alcohol use. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a world driven by the anger and fear that underpins Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "real estate holder" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. At one point she says that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn something about an the United States that her online critics would not understand, would not even see".

The Homicide Account

So then we come to the murder itself – and the eponymous day spent by the deceased with the killer and his friends. Kraus has compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when Brandon came to visit Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, loitering fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

Catt develops an obsession by the narrative, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who comes alive in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman derailing in a struggling, neglected community. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par