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The new book centers on protagonists seeking clean slates, struggling to escape drugs or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into conflict. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", transforming it into deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the story. And yet, the author herself is embarking on her individual reinvention, since this appears a different type of work – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. However it proves to be packed with the familiar conflicts and approaches as her previous works.

From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book

The writer was originally an artist who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming confessional female writing from abjection into assassination. She continued writing, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style imparted to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a maverick maker who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It makes sense that she currently desires to experiment with different types of content, turning outward to other people's stories, at a moment when she asserts that current political era renders personal narrative obsolete.

Several Eras, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing three generations – all unable to escape their pasts. The book includes the story of characters Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, relocating from the urban environment to a pastoral setting. Additionally the account of Kraus, in the guise of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one directionless individual by another in a community mostly forsaken by progressive politics only a short distance from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.

As a reader drawn to honed writing of the type the author herself often avoids, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.

As someone who reads who appreciates honed writing of the style that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was captivated by the literary tone of the opening segment. It exhibits a fresh level of observation that makes room for small details, like the container that the young Catt dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her cherished parent. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a nice toy", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like piece candy". She tells Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the satisfaction readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the unpolished style she shares with her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels comes back in the middle section. The protagonist is attempting to do up multiple decrepit residences in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid her husband curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as her spouse moves between poorly supported positions as an substance abuse counselor 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 a platform, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "real estate holder" on a reference site. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. At one point she states that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she could potentially understand something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even see".

The Murder Narrative

So then we come to the homicide in question – and the titular day experienced by the murdered individual with the killer and his associates. Kraus has compelling foundational content, and knows hour by hour what transpired when the victim Brandon came to meet 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, mooching around getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by her romantic interest Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to go further into her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who comes alive partially because of Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the point that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par