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This latest work centers on characters seeking clean slates, attempting to leave behind drugs or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", rendering it willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the narrative. And yet, Kraus herself is embarking on her individual reinvention, since this seems a novel form of writing – fact-based, authentically narrative. However it reveals itself to be packed with the same dilemmas and styles as earlier books.

From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book

Kraus started out as an visual artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming confessional female writing from humiliation into defiance. She kept producing books, but the following three engaging and challenging novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format brought to the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a renegade artist who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It makes sense that she now wants to explore new kinds of material, turning outward to other people's stories, at a time when she states that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative redundant.

Three Generations, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering three generations – each trapped by their backgrounds. We encounter the story of Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, moving from the urban environment to a pastoral setting. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. The third thread involves the story of the murder of one directionless individual by another in a town 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 Kraus often avoids, I was captivated by the literary tone of the initial segment.

As someone who reads who favors honed writing of the style that Kraus usually avoids, I was captivated by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates trivial aspects, like the bucket that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a nice toy", he replies, "the nuanced interpretations of terms rolling around in their mouths like hard candy". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not entirely her own."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this different style could continue through the novel. The author states here that she resents the pleasure readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disruption, to the unpolished style she has in common with her hero author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her earlier works comes back in the middle section. Catt Greene is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between two different states, unable to aid Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between poorly supported positions as an recovery specialist in a environment driven by the hostility and dread that drives a political win. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "author" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. At one point she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her online critics would not understand, would overlook entirely".

The Murder Narrative

So then we come to the murder itself – and the referenced day experienced by the deceased with the perpetrator and his companions. Kraus utilizes great source material, and knows hour by hour what happened when the victim Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by Brittney's partner Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression clash in this segment. Yet I wished her to go further into her personal fixations here. The standout figure is Brittney herself, who gains dimension partly through Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par