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This latest work features protagonists seeking fresh starts, attempting to leave behind substance abuse or harmful partnerships, only to witness hope devolve into conflict. The author often employs the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into willfully cynical through its repetitions. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the story. Meanwhile, she seems to be making her own fresh start, because this appears a new kind of book – fact-based, truly literary. Yet it proves to be laden with the recurring issues and approaches as earlier books.

From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work

The writer was originally an artist who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, elevating personal female narrative from abjection into defiance. She kept producing books, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels lacked the power and directness that the correspondence format brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a nonconformist creator who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It makes sense that she now wants to try out fresh narrative sources, turning outward to other people's stories, at a time when she states that current political era renders personal narrative unnecessary.

Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, spanning multiple eras – none able to break free from their histories. There is the tale of characters Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, relocating from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction a man named Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one directionless individual by another in a locality mostly forsaken by progressive politics only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.

As a reader attracted to refined literature of the sort the author herself typically rejects, I was captivated by the literary tone of the initial segment.

As someone who reads who favors precise prose of the variety that Kraus herself often disregards, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the initial part. It possesses a fresh level of observation that allows space for minutiae, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a great plaything", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words rolling around in their mouths like sweet treats". Kraus writes Emma's story with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this fresh tone could last out the book. Kraus says here that she resents the pleasure audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disruption, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels reasserts itself in the middle section. Catt is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between Minnesota and LA, unsuccessful in assisting Paul control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a environment fueled by the anger and fear that powers a political win. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. At one point she says that she's investigating the murder so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would not even see".

The Murder Narrative

So then we come to the murder itself – and the eponymous day spent by the deceased with the killer and his associates. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and details moment by moment what happened when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, mooching around having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being murdered by her romantic interest Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

Catt develops an obsession by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to delve deeper into her individual preoccupations here. The standout figure is Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par