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The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with characters pursuing clean slates, trying to break free from drugs or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into conflict. Kraus often employs the phrase "fresh start", making it deliberately jaded through recurring use. Examples include "He aimed to start over" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the narrative. At the same time, she is embarking on her individual reinvention, since this presents as a different type of work – fact-based, authentically narrative. Yet it proves to be filled with the recurring issues and styles as earlier books.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

Chris Kraus began as an visual artist who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, elevating personal female narrative from humiliation into assassination. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels lacked the power and directness that the correspondence format infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a nonconformist creator who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on housing investments. It makes sense that she now wants to try out different types of content, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a moment when she claims that contemporary political climate turns intimate literature obsolete.

Three Generations, 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 backgrounds. There is the tale of Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, transitioning from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. 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 emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one directionless individual by another in a locality long abandoned by liberal ideals only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.

For this reader fond of refined literature of the kind Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the literary tone of the opening part.

As a reader drawn to honed writing of the variety that the author tends to eschew, I was won over by the literary tone of the first section. It exhibits a fresh level of observation that makes room for trivial aspects, like the pail that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the start of the story, helped by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he answers, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like sweet treats". Kraus writes the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was fated to feel let down when I hoped this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the satisfaction audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works reasserts itself in the middle section. Catt is working on refurbishing three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while moving between two different states, unsuccessful in assisting Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul moves between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a world driven by the rage and anxiety that drives a political win. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her occupation changed from "writer" to "real estate holder" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. On one occasion she says that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she could potentially understand something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would overlook entirely".

The Homicide Account

Then we reach to the murder itself – and the referenced day experienced by the deceased with the perpetrator and his associates. The author possesses excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what occurred as Brandon came to see Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day with her companions, mooching around fixing his automobile 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

Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who gains dimension in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par