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The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with characters seeking clean slates, struggling to escape drugs or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into conflict. The author frequently uses the phrase "new beginning", rendering it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the narrative. And yet, Kraus herself appears to be undertaking her personal new beginning, because this presents as a new kind of book – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. But then it reveals itself to be laden with the familiar conflicts and approaches as past novels.

From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic

Chris Kraus started out as an visual artist who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating confessional female writing from humiliation into defiance. She kept producing books, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format imparted to the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a maverick maker who had evolved into a extensive real estate holder, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It makes sense that she presently aims to explore new kinds of material, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a moment when she asserts that Trumpian politics makes confessional writing redundant.

Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering several time periods – all unable to escape their backgrounds. There is the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, relocating from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a locality long abandoned by liberal ideals only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.

As a reader attracted to refined literature of the type the author herself often avoids, I was captivated by the narrative style of the first section.

As a reader drawn to precise prose of the style that the author often disregards, I was won over by the literary tone of the initial part. It exhibits a fresh level of observation that makes room for small details, like the pail that the young Catt frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was fated to feel let down when I hoped this new voice could persist to the end. The author states here that she resents the pleasure those who appreciate polished prose have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels comes back in the central part. The protagonist is trying to renovate 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 is overwhelmed as her spouse transitions between low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a world driven by the hostility and dread that underpins Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on social media, her listed profession modified from "author" to "property owner" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. On one occasion she says that she's investigating the murder so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an America that her social media opponents would not understand, would not even see".

The Homicide Account

Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day passed by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his friends. Kraus utilizes compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what occurred as Brandon came to meet Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day in the company of her associates, wandering about getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I found myself captivated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partly through Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par