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The Four Spent the Day Together features characters seeking clean slates, struggling to escape addictions or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Kraus frequently uses the phrase "fresh start", rendering it willfully cynical through recurring use. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the story. At the same time, Kraus herself appears to be undertaking her personal new beginning, because this seems a new kind of book – documentarian, authentically narrative. But then it turns out to be laden with the familiar conflicts and approaches as earlier books.

From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic

Kraus was originally an visual artist who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, transforming intimate women's literature from abjection into assassination. She continued writing, 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. It didn't help was her position as a renegade artist who had become a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It makes sense that she presently aims to explore new kinds of material, turning outward to the experiences of others, at a moment when she claims that current political era turns intimate literature unnecessary.

Multiple Generations, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering several time periods – each trapped by their pasts. There is the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, relocating from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the narrative of the author, 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. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a community long abandoned by liberal ideals only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in rural Minnesota.

As a reader fond of polished prose of the kind the author herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the narrative style of the first section.

Being a reader drawn to crafted language of the variety that the author usually avoids, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the initial part. There is a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for minutiae, like the pail that the young Catt frees from the ice at the start of the story, assisted by her adored dad. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a great plaything", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". She tells Emma's story with interest and closeness. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."

Frustration and Disruption

I was fated to feel let down when I wished this different style could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the pleasure audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her idol Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels reasserts itself in the middle section. Catt Greene is working on refurbishing three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between two different states, unsuccessful in assisting Paul control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as her spouse moves between poorly supported positions as an recovery specialist in a world fueled by the hostility and dread that drives a political win. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "author" to "landlord" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to be overly concerned 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 America that her Twitter detractors would fail to comprehend, would overlook entirely".

The Murder Narrative

Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the titular day spent by the victim with the killer and his friends. Kraus utilizes great source material, and knows hour by hour what happened when a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day in the company of her associates, wandering about getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by Brittney's partner Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her individual preoccupations here. The standout figure is Brittney herself, who gains dimension partly through Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par