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This latest work centers on characters chasing after new beginnings, trying to break free from substance abuse or harmful partnerships, only to see hope turn into conflict. The author frequently uses the phrase "new beginning", transforming it into deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the text. At the same time, she is embarking on her individual reinvention, since this seems a new kind of book – observational, authentically narrative. But then it reveals itself to be laden with the recurring issues and aesthetics as past novels.

From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book

Kraus was originally an visual artist who transitioned to writing unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating intimate women's literature from self-debasement into rebellion. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the letter form infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a renegade artist who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It follows that she currently desires to try out fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to external narratives, at a time when she claims that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative obsolete.

Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering multiple eras – all unable to escape their histories. We encounter the narrative about Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, transitioning from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the persona 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 a man named Paul. Finally the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a locality long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.

For this reader drawn to polished prose of the kind Kraus tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.

Being a reader who appreciates crafted language of the variety that the author often disregards, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the initial part. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for minutiae, like the container that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the opening of the book, aided by her adored dad. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". The author narrates Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."

Frustration and Disruption

I was destined to be disappointed when I hoped this fresh tone could persist to the end. The author states here that she is annoyed by the satisfaction readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to disruption, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her idol author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works reasserts itself in the middle section. Catt Greene is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between Minnesota and LA, unable to aid Paul control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through poorly supported positions as an substance abuse counselor in a society driven by the hostility and dread that drives Trump's victory. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her occupation changed from "writer" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. On one occasion she says that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her social media opponents would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".

The Murder Narrative

So then we come to the homicide in question – and the titular day experienced by the deceased with the killer and his associates. Kraus has compelling foundational content, and details moment by moment what happened when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being shot by Brittney's partner Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing wrestle in this part. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who gains dimension in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par