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The new book is populated with characters pursuing fresh starts, struggling to escape addictions or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into violence. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", making it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Examples include "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the story. At the same time, she appears to be undertaking her individual reinvention, because this seems a different type of work – documentarian, truly literary. But then it proves to be packed with the same dilemmas and approaches as her previous works.

From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic

Kraus started out as an creative who entered the literary world somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating personal female narrative from humiliation into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels lacked the power and directness that the epistolary style brought to the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a nonconformist creator who had evolved into a major property owner, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It makes sense that she presently aims to try out new kinds of material, turning outward to other people's stories, at a moment when she asserts that contemporary political climate turns intimate literature redundant.

Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, spanning several time periods – all unable to escape their backgrounds. The book includes the tale of Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, moving from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. There is the account of Kraus, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a community mostly forsaken by liberal ideals only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.

From my perspective as a reader drawn to honed writing of the sort Kraus tends to eschew, I was seduced by the narrative style of the first section.

Being a reader drawn to crafted language of the style that Kraus usually avoids, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the first section. There is a novel degree of detail that makes room for minutiae, like the container that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a nice toy", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". She tells the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was destined to be disappointed when I wished this new voice could last out the book. The author states here that she dislikes the enjoyment those who appreciate polished prose have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she has in common with her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books returns in the second segment. The protagonist is working on refurbishing three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while moving between two different states, unable to aid Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul moves between underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a society driven by the anger and fear that drives Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on social media, her listed profession modified from "author" to "property owner" on a reference site. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she says that she's looking into the killing so that before exiting the region, "she could potentially understand something about an the nation that her online critics would not understand, would not even see".

The Murder Narrative

Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the referenced day experienced by the murdered individual with the killer and his companions. Kraus has excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day with her companions, mooching around having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being murdered by her romantic interest Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partially because of Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The complete segment feels oddly unfinished, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par