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This latest work is populated with protagonists pursuing clean slates, struggling to escape addictions or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into violence. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", rendering it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the story. At the same time, she appears to be undertaking her personal new beginning, because this seems a new kind of book – fact-based, authentically narrative. But then it turns out to be packed with the familiar conflicts and styles as earlier books.

From Chance Novelist to Iconic Work

The writer was originally an artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, converting confessional female writing from humiliation into assassination. She kept producing books, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels missed the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style imparted to the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a nonconformist creator who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It makes sense that she now wants to experiment with different types of content, directing her gaze to other people's stories, at a moment when she asserts that current political era makes confessional writing obsolete.

Three Generations, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing several time periods – all unable to escape their backgrounds. We encounter the story of Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, moving from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. There is the narrative of the author, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a locality largely deserted by liberal ideals only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.

For this reader attracted to polished prose of the sort Kraus herself typically rejects, I was captivated by the narrative style of the initial segment.

As someone who reads who appreciates crafted language of the style that the author often disregards, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the first section. It possesses a novel degree of detail that allows space for minutiae, like the bucket that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her adored dad. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she exclaims; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". She tells Emma's narrative with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."

Frustration and Disruption

I was destined to be disappointed when I wished this new voice could continue through the novel. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disruption, to the untidy aesthetics she has in common with her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her earlier works reasserts itself in the middle section. The protagonist is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between Minnesota and LA, unsuccessful in assisting her husband control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as her spouse transitions between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a environment fueled by the hostility and dread that powers Trump's victory. A significant portion discusses about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her listed profession modified from "writer" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she states that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she might be able to learn something about an the nation that her social media opponents would not understand, would not even see".

The Homicide Account

So then we come to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day experienced by the deceased with the killer and his companions. Kraus has great source material, and details moment by moment what happened when a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He sought a sexual encounter but seems affably to have spent the day with her companions, wandering about fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

Catt develops an obsession by the narrative, and I found myself captivated by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing wrestle in this part. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who gains dimension partly through Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par