The Four Spent the Day Together

A successful writer chafes at criticism and obsesses over a murder case in the ponderous latest from Kraus (I Love Dick). The novel begins with four-year-old Catt Greene’s move with her family from the East Bronx to the Connecticut beach town of Milford in the 1960s. As the Greene family struggles in the ensuing years to adapt to suburbia, Catt explores drugs, sex, and radical politics. Kraus then skips ahead to the 2010s, when Catt’s writing career gets a belated jump-start that mirrors Kraus’s own. Like Kraus, Catt published an autobiographical novel titled I Love Dick in the 1990s, which is now rediscovered and adapted for TV. Meanwhile, Catt, who lives in Los Angeles with her partner, Paul, stews over snarky tweets about her role as a landlord and catches flak from an antigentrification group over her involvement with an L.A. art gallery. She and Paul then retreat to northern Minnesota, where Catt reads about the killing of a local man named Brandon Halbach and the three teens charged with his murder. Sensing that her life is now “redundant,” she considers writing about something else and muses on how to mine the murder for a novel. The combination of score-settling and an artist’s search for new material makes for an awkward stab at autofiction. This fails to capture the magic of the author’s previous work. Agent: Laurence Laluyaux, RCW Literary. (Oct.)