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The new book is populated with characters chasing after clean slates, struggling to escape addictions or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into violence. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", making it willfully cynical through recurring use. Examples include "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the text. At the same time, Kraus herself seems to be making her personal new beginning, since this presents as a new kind of book – observational, authentically narrative. Yet it turns out to be laden with the same dilemmas and approaches as past novels.

From Accidental Writer to Iconic Work

Chris Kraus started out as an creative who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting confessional female writing from abjection into assassination. She continued writing, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels missed the shock and immediacy that the letter form infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her role as a nonconformist creator who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was significant attention on housing investments. It is logical that she now wants to try out different types of content, turning outward to other people's stories, at a moment when she states that current political era turns intimate literature unnecessary.

Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, encompassing several time periods – none able to break free from their histories. There is the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, relocating from the Bronx to a pastoral setting. Then there is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of protagonist Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her partner struggling with addiction a man named Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one directionless individual by another in a locality mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.

As a reader drawn to refined literature of the kind the author herself typically rejects, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the opening part.

As a reader who favors crafted language of the variety that Kraus usually avoids, I was won over by the literary tone of the first section. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates small details, like the bucket that the young Catt frees from the ice at the start of the story, assisted by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a great plaything", he answers, "the nuanced interpretations of terms rolling around in their mouths like hard candy". She tells Emma's narrative with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this new voice could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the satisfaction those who appreciate polished prose have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the unpolished style she has in common with her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books comes back in the middle section. Catt Greene is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between Minnesota and LA, unable to aid her husband curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul cycles through poorly supported positions as an addiction therapist in a world propelled by the rage and anxiety that drives Trump's victory. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her occupation changed from "author" to "real estate holder" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. In a moment she says that she's investigating the murder so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would fail to comprehend, would not even perceive".

The Murder Narrative

Thus we arrive to the homicide in question – and the referenced day passed by the deceased with the perpetrator and his companions. The author possesses excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what transpired when the victim Brandon came to visit Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, loitering getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to go further into her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par