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This latest work features characters chasing after clean slates, struggling to escape substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into violence. Kraus frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", making it intentionally weary through its repetitions. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the text. At the same time, Kraus herself seems to be making her own fresh start, because this presents as a new kind of book – fact-based, authentically narrative. Yet it proves to be filled with the familiar conflicts and styles as earlier books.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

The writer was originally an visual artist who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, converting confessional female writing from humiliation into rebellion. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a nonconformist creator who had evolved into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It is logical that she now wants to experiment with new kinds of material, turning outward to external narratives, at a time when she states that current political era makes confessional writing obsolete.

Several Eras, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning several time periods – all unable to escape their pasts. The book includes the story of characters Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, transitioning from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a town mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.

From my perspective as a reader attracted to polished prose of the type Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.

As a reader who favors crafted language of the kind that Kraus often disregards, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. It exhibits a fresh level of observation that accommodates small details, like the pail that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a lovely toy", he answers, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like hard candy". Kraus writes Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not entirely her own."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this new voice could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she resents the enjoyment readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she echoes from her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her past books returns in the second segment. Catt is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help her husband manage his alcohol use. She feels helpless as Paul transitions between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a environment driven by the rage and anxiety that powers Trump's victory. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her occupation changed from "novelist" to "landlord" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even perceive".

The Homicide Account

Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the titular day spent by the murdered individual with the murderer and his friends. Kraus utilizes great source material, and details moment by moment what transpired when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He sought a sexual encounter but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, loitering fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards responsible documentation and reckless transgression tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partially because of the protagonist's connection to her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par