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The new book features individuals pursuing clean slates, trying to break free from substance abuse or toxic relationships, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. The author often employs the phrase "fresh start", transforming it into willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the narrative. And yet, the author herself appears to be undertaking her personal new beginning, because this presents as a new kind of book – documentarian, truly literary. Yet it turns out to be packed with the recurring issues and approaches as earlier books.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

Chris Kraus began as an artist who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting confessional female writing from self-debasement into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the letter form brought to the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her role as a renegade artist who had turned into a extensive real estate holder, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It follows that she now wants to explore different types of content, turning outward to external narratives, at a time when she claims that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing obsolete.

Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, spanning three generations – none able to break free from their backgrounds. There is the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, moving from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. There is the account of Kraus, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a town mostly forsaken by liberal ideals only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.

As a reader fond of honed writing of the type Kraus typically rejects, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.

Being a reader who appreciates precise prose of the variety that Kraus tends to eschew, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the initial part. There is a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for minutiae, like the pail that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her cherished parent. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms rolling around in their mouths like hard candy". The author narrates Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this different style could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the satisfaction readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books reasserts itself in the second segment. Catt Greene is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while moving between Minnesota and LA, unable to aid her husband curb his addiction. She feels helpless as her spouse moves between poorly supported positions as an recovery specialist in a environment fueled by the anger and fear that drives an electoral success. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her occupation changed from "author" to "landlord" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. On one occasion she states that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an the United States that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even perceive".

The Murder Narrative

So then we come to the actual killing – and the titular day experienced by the victim with the perpetrator and his companions. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when Brandon came to meet Brittney after connecting via an application where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, loitering having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being shot by her romantic interest Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt develops an obsession by the account, and I found myself captivated by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her own obsessions here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who comes alive in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the point that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par