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This latest work centers on protagonists seeking clean slates, attempting to leave behind drugs or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into violence. The author often employs the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the text. And yet, she seems to be making her personal new beginning, since this seems a novel form of writing – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. But then it reveals itself to be filled with the familiar conflicts and styles as past novels.

From Accidental Writer to Iconic Work

Kraus began as an artist who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating intimate women's literature from abjection into assassination. She kept producing books, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels missed the impact and rawness that the letter form infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a maverick maker who had evolved into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It makes sense that she now wants to try out new kinds of material, turning outward to external narratives, at a moment when she claims that Trumpian politics makes confessional writing unnecessary.

Multiple Generations, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning multiple eras – all unable to escape their histories. There is the story of characters Emma and Jasper, versions of Kraus's parents, relocating from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. There is the account of Kraus, in the character of Catt Greene, grappling with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction her husband Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one directionless individual by another in a town long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.

As a reader drawn to honed writing of the sort Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the opening part.

As a reader drawn to honed writing of the kind that the author usually avoids, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the first section. It possesses a novel degree of detail that makes room for minutiae, like the container that the protagonist as a child dislodges from ice at the opening of the book, aided by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a lovely toy", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". The author narrates Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."

Frustration and Disruption

I was fated to feel let down when I wished this new voice could last out the book. Kraus says here that she dislikes the enjoyment audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works reasserts itself in the second segment. Catt is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul moves between underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a world fueled by the rage and anxiety that powers Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she states that she's investigating the murder 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 Homicide Account

So then we come to the murder itself – and the referenced day experienced by the deceased with the killer and his companions. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and knows hour by hour what occurred as Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy 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 boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

Catt develops an obsession by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who becomes vivid partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par