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This latest work is populated with characters pursuing clean slates, struggling to escape drugs or harmful partnerships, only to see hope turn into aggression. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", making it willfully cynical through recurring use. Phrases such as "He aimed to start over" and "They chose to begin anew" appear throughout the story. At the same time, Kraus herself is embarking on her personal new beginning, as this appears a new kind of book – observational, authentically narrative. But then it proves to be filled with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as her previous works.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

Chris Kraus was originally an creative who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as epistles to an unresponsive love interest, transforming personal female narrative from humiliation into assassination. She continued writing, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style infused into the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a renegade artist who had evolved into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It follows that she presently aims to explore new kinds of material, turning outward to external narratives, at a period in which she asserts that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing redundant.

Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering multiple eras – each trapped by their pasts. We encounter the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, relocating from the urban environment to a pastoral setting. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction a man named Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one troubled youth by another in a town long abandoned by liberal ideals only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader fond of refined literature of the type Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.

As someone who reads drawn to crafted language of the variety that the author tends to eschew, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the first section. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates minutiae, like the bucket that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her adored dad. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". Kraus writes Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not entirely her own."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she resents the satisfaction readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the unpolished style she has in common with her inspiration Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels reasserts itself in the second segment. Catt is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as her spouse moves between underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a environment propelled by the hostility and dread that drives a political win. A significant portion discusses about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her listed profession modified from "author" to "landlord" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. At one point she states that she's looking into the killing so that before leaving Minnesota, "she might be able to learn something about an America that her Twitter detractors would fail to comprehend, would not even see".

The Murder Narrative

Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the referenced day experienced by the murdered individual with the killer and his friends. Kraus utilizes excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what happened when Brandon came to meet Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He sought a sexual encounter but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

Catt develops an obsession by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and reckless transgression tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through the protagonist's connection to her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par