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The Four Spent the Day Together features individuals chasing after fresh starts, attempting to leave behind drugs or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into conflict. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", making it deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They opted for a clean break" are scattered across the narrative. And yet, the author herself is embarking on her own fresh start, as this appears a new kind of book – observational, truly literary. Yet it turns out to be laden with the same dilemmas and approaches as earlier books.

From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book

Kraus started out as an visual artist who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, transforming personal female narrative from humiliation into defiance. She kept producing books, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels missed the power and directness that the correspondence format brought to the voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a maverick maker who had turned into a major property owner, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It follows that she currently desires to try out fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a period in which she claims that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing unnecessary.

Three Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering several time periods – all unable to escape their backgrounds. We encounter the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, moving from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a community mostly forsaken by liberal ideals only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader attracted to honed writing of the type the author herself often avoids, I was captivated by the narrative style of the initial segment.

Being a reader who favors crafted language of the kind that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for trivial aspects, like the container that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, helped by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a nice toy", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". She tells Emma's story with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was destined to be disappointed when I hoped this fresh tone could last out the book. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the satisfaction audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works returns in the central part. Catt is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help her husband control his drinking. She feels helpless as her spouse cycles through poorly supported positions as an substance abuse counselor in a world driven by the anger and fear that powers an electoral success. A significant portion discusses about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her occupation changed from "novelist" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. At one point she remarks that she's investigating the murder so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn something about an the nation that her social media opponents would be unable to grasp, would not even see".

The Homicide Account

So then we come to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day passed by the murdered individual with the killer and his companions. Kraus has great source material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when Brandon came to meet Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, loitering having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt develops an obsession by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who gains dimension partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par