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The Four Spent the Day Together features protagonists pursuing fresh starts, trying to break free from substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into violence. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", rendering it willfully cynical through recurring use. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the story. And yet, she seems to be making her personal new beginning, because this seems a novel form of writing – documentarian, authentically narrative. But then it reveals itself to be filled with the recurring issues and approaches as past novels.

From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic

The writer began as an creative who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming personal female narrative from abjection into rebellion. She kept producing books, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels lacked the impact and rawness that the epistolary style imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her position as a renegade artist who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It makes sense that she presently aims to explore different types of content, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a period in which she states that Trumpian politics makes confessional writing obsolete.

Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering several time periods – all unable to escape their histories. The book includes the tale of characters Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, transitioning from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. There is the account of Kraus, in the character of Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction a man named Paul. Finally the story of the murder of one troubled youth by another in a town largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.

For this reader fond of polished prose of the kind Kraus typically rejects, I was seduced by the literary tone of the opening part.

As someone who reads who appreciates crafted language of the kind that the author usually avoids, I was captivated by the literary tone of the initial part. It possesses a novel degree of detail that allows space for minutiae, like the pail that the protagonist as a child dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her adored dad. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like piece candy". She tells Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this fresh tone could last out the book. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her inspiration Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels reasserts itself in the central part. The protagonist is attempting to do up multiple decrepit residences in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while shuttling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help her husband control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as Paul transitions between low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a environment fueled by the rage and anxiety that powers an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her occupation changed from "writer" to "landlord" on a reference site. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. At one point she states that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn something about an the United States that her social media opponents would be unable to grasp, would not even see".

The Killing Story

Then we reach to the murder itself – and the titular day spent by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his companions. Kraus has excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what occurred as a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, mooching around getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to go further into her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who gains dimension partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par