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This latest work features individuals chasing after clean slates, struggling to escape addictions or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into violence. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" are scattered across the narrative. Meanwhile, she is embarking on her individual reinvention, since this seems a different type of work – observational, authentically narrative. However it turns out to be filled with the familiar conflicts and approaches as past novels.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

The writer started out as an visual artist who transitioned to writing unintentionally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming intimate women's literature from self-debasement into assassination. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the power and directness that the epistolary style imparted to the voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a maverick maker who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was significant attention on real estate deals. It is logical that she presently aims to try out fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a period in which she asserts that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature redundant.

Several Eras, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering multiple eras – each trapped by their histories. There is the story of Emma and Jasper, versions of the author's parents, transitioning from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of 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 story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a town long abandoned by liberal ideals only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.

For this reader drawn to polished prose of the type Kraus often avoids, I was seduced by the literary tone of the initial segment.

As a reader who favors precise prose of the style that Kraus often disregards, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the initial part. There is a fresh level of observation that allows space for minutiae, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child dislodges from ice at the start of the story, assisted by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she exclaims; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms rolling around in their mouths like hard candy". She tells Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not entirely her own."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she resents the pleasure audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she has in common with her hero author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books reasserts itself in the middle section. Catt is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between two different states, unsuccessful in assisting her husband curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul transitions between low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a world driven by the rage and anxiety that underpins a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her occupation changed from "writer" to "property owner" on a reference site. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she says that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even perceive".

The Homicide Account

Then we reach to the murder itself – and the titular day passed by the victim with the killer and his friends. Kraus has excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who comes alive partly through Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a struggling, neglected community. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The complete segment feels oddly unfinished, to the point that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par