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The new book is populated with characters chasing after clean slates, trying to break free from addictions or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into violence. The author frequently uses the phrase "fresh start", rendering it intentionally weary through recurring use. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" recur in the story. And yet, Kraus herself seems to be making her personal new beginning, because this presents as a novel form of writing – observational, genuinely novelistic. Yet it turns out to be filled with the familiar conflicts and approaches as past novels.

From Accidental Writer to Iconic Work

Chris 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 confessional female writing from humiliation into assassination. She continued writing, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style brought to the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a renegade artist who had evolved into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It makes sense that she currently desires to try out fresh narrative sources, turning outward to external narratives, at a period in which she claims that current political era makes confessional writing unnecessary.

Multiple Generations, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, encompassing several time periods – all unable to escape their pasts. We encounter the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, moving from the Bronx to a pastoral setting. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband a man named Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a town mostly forsaken by progressive politics only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader fond of polished prose of the kind Kraus herself typically rejects, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the first section.

As someone who reads who favors precise prose of the style that the author tends to eschew, I was won over by the novelistic voice of the first section. It possesses a novel degree of detail that accommodates trivial aspects, like the container that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a nice toy", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". The author narrates Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."

Frustration and Disruption

I was fated to feel let down when I hoped this fresh tone could last out the book. Kraus says here that she dislikes the enjoyment readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to disruption, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her hero author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels returns in the middle section. Catt Greene is attempting to do up multiple decrepit residences in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between two different states, failing to help her husband control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a world fueled by the anger and fear that powers Trump's victory. A significant portion discusses about Catt's social media ostracism on social media, her listed profession modified from "author" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she remarks that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an America that her social media opponents would fail to comprehend, would not even perceive".

The Murder Narrative

Then we reach to the actual killing – and the eponymous day passed by the victim with the killer and his associates. The author possesses great source material, and knows hour by hour what occurred as Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, mooching around getting his car mended and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

Catt develops an obsession by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who comes alive partially because of the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the point that her narrative ends almost mid-par