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The Four Spent the Day Together centers on characters seeking fresh starts, struggling to escape addictions or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into aggression. Kraus often employs the phrase "new beginning", transforming it into intentionally weary through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the text. And yet, Kraus herself appears to be undertaking her personal new beginning, as this seems a novel form of writing – documentarian, authentically narrative. However it reveals itself to be laden with the familiar conflicts and approaches as past novels.

From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic

The writer started out as an artist who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as missives to a distant beloved, converting confessional female writing from abjection into rebellion. She continued writing, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style brought to the voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her position as a renegade artist who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on real estate deals. It follows that she presently aims to experiment with different types of content, directing her gaze to other people's stories, at a period in which she asserts that current political era makes confessional writing unnecessary.

Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering three generations – all unable to escape their backgrounds. There is the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, versions of the author's parents, transitioning from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. Additionally the narrative of the author, in the character of Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a town largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.

As a reader fond of refined literature of the sort Kraus tends to eschew, I was seduced by the narrative style of the first section.

As someone who reads drawn to crafted language of the style that the author usually avoids, I was won over by the literary tone of the initial part. There is a fresh level of observation that accommodates trivial aspects, like the bucket that the young Catt dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a great plaything", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like hard candy". She tells Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was fated to feel let down when I wished this fresh tone could last out the book. The author states here that she resents the satisfaction those who appreciate polished prose have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her idol author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works comes back in the second segment. Catt Greene is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting Paul control his drinking. She feels helpless as her spouse cycles through low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a society propelled by the rage and anxiety that powers an electoral success. A significant portion discusses about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. At one point she states that she's looking into the killing so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even see".

The Killing Story

Then we reach to the murder itself – and the eponymous day passed by the victim with the murderer and his friends. Kraus utilizes compelling foundational content, and knows hour by hour what occurred as Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, 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 aggressive outbursts.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who comes alive in part due to the protagonist's connection to her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par