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This latest work features individuals seeking new beginnings, struggling to escape drugs or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", rendering it intentionally weary through recurring use. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the narrative. Meanwhile, she seems to be making her individual reinvention, because this appears a new kind of book – documentarian, authentically narrative. But then it proves to be laden with the same dilemmas and styles as her previous works.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

Chris Kraus was originally an visual artist who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, converting confessional female writing from humiliation into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the impact and rawness that the epistolary style infused into the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a renegade artist who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was significant attention on real estate deals. It follows that she presently aims to try out new kinds of material, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a moment when she asserts that current political era turns intimate literature unnecessary.

Several Eras, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering several time periods – all unable to escape their pasts. The book includes the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, relocating from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the character of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. The third thread involves the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a community largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only 80 miles from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.

As a reader attracted to refined literature of the kind the author herself often avoids, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the opening part.

As someone who reads drawn to crafted language of the style that Kraus tends to eschew, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the initial part. There is a novel degree of detail that accommodates trivial aspects, like the bucket that the young Catt frees from the ice at the start of the story, aided by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a nice toy", he answers, "the nuanced interpretations of terms tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". She tells the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was destined to be disappointed when I hoped this new voice could last out the book. The author states here that she dislikes the enjoyment readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she echoes from her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her past books comes back in the second segment. Catt Greene is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between Minnesota and LA, unable to aid her husband control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a world driven by the hostility and dread that powers Trump's victory. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her listed profession modified from "author" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she says that she's looking into the killing so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn something about an America that her social media opponents would not understand, would not even perceive".

The Homicide Account

So then we come to the homicide in question – and the referenced day experienced by the victim with the perpetrator and his associates. The author possesses great source material, and knows hour by hour what transpired when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, mooching around getting his car mended and funding treats and narcotics, before being shot by Brittney's partner Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for aggressive outbursts.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

Catt develops an obsession by the account, and I found myself captivated by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to delve deeper into her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partially because of the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that Catt speaks to Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par