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The Four Spent the Day Together features characters chasing after clean slates, trying to break free from addictions or toxic relationships, only to witness hope devolve into violence. The author often employs the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into intentionally weary through recurring use. Phrases such as "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They opted for a clean break" are scattered across the story. At the same time, Kraus herself appears to be undertaking her own fresh start, since this seems a new kind of book – fact-based, truly literary. Yet it turns out to be laden with the recurring issues and approaches as earlier books.

From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work

The writer started out as an artist who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as missives to a distant beloved, elevating confessional female writing from abjection into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the following three fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the letter form imparted to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a renegade artist who had evolved into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on real estate deals. It follows that she now wants to explore new kinds of material, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a period in which she states that contemporary political climate turns intimate literature obsolete.

Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering multiple eras – all unable to escape their pasts. We encounter the narrative about Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, relocating from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. There is the account of Kraus, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a town long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only 80 miles from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.

For this reader fond of honed writing of the sort Kraus herself often avoids, I was captivated by the narrative style of the first section.

As someone who reads drawn to precise prose of the kind that Kraus herself often disregards, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the initial part. There is a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for small details, like the container that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the opening of the book, helped by her adored dad. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". The author narrates Emma's story with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."

Frustration and Disruption

I was fated to feel let down when I expected this fresh tone could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels reasserts itself in the middle section. The protagonist is working on refurbishing three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between two different states, unable to aid Paul manage his alcohol use. She feels helpless as Paul moves between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a environment driven by the anger and fear that powers a political win. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on social media, her occupation changed from "writer" to "landlord" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. On one occasion she says that she's looking into the killing so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn something about an the nation that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would overlook entirely".

The Murder Narrative

Thus we arrive to the homicide in question – and the referenced day passed by the victim with the murderer and his friends. Kraus has great source material, and details moment by moment what happened when the victim Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for aggressive outbursts.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

Catt develops an obsession by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl spiraling out of control in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par