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The Four Spent the Day Together features protagonists pursuing new beginnings, struggling to escape drugs or harmful partnerships, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", making it deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the narrative. At the same time, Kraus herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, because this seems a new kind of book – observational, authentically narrative. However it proves to be laden with the familiar conflicts and styles as past novels.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

Kraus started out as an visual artist who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as missives to a distant beloved, elevating personal female narrative from abjection into rebellion. She continued writing, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels did not possess the impact and rawness that the correspondence format imparted 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 real estate deals. It is logical that she now wants to try out different types of content, turning outward to other people's stories, at a moment when she states that current political era makes confessional writing unnecessary.

Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning three generations – each trapped by their pasts. We encounter the story of Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, relocating from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. Additionally the account of Kraus, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one directionless individual by another in a community largely deserted by liberal ideals only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in a remote part of Minnesota.

For this reader fond of polished prose of the sort Kraus often avoids, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.

Being a reader who favors precise prose of the variety that the author often disregards, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. It possesses a fresh level of observation that accommodates minutiae, like the container that the protagonist as a child dislodges from ice at the opening of the book, assisted by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a nice toy", he answers, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like sweet treats". The author narrates the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."

Frustration and Disruption

I was fated to feel let down when I hoped this fresh tone could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she resents the satisfaction audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels returns in the middle section. Catt is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while moving between Minnesota and LA, unable to aid her husband control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a world driven by the hostility and dread that drives Trump's victory. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. On one occasion she says that she's looking into the killing so that before leaving Minnesota, "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

So then we come to the actual killing – and the titular day spent by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his companions. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what happened when Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He sought a sexual encounter but seems affably to have spent the day with her companions, mooching around having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who gains dimension partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par