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This latest work is populated with characters seeking fresh starts, attempting to leave behind addictions or toxic relationships, only to see hope turn into violence. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "fresh start", making it willfully cynical through recurring use. Examples include "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the narrative. At the same time, Kraus herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, because this seems a novel form of writing – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. Yet it reveals itself to be laden with the familiar conflicts and styles as her previous works.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

Kraus started out 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 confessional female writing from humiliation into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels missed the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style brought to the voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her role as a nonconformist creator who had turned into a extensive real estate holder, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It makes sense that she now wants to experiment with fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to external narratives, at a moment when she claims that Trumpian politics makes confessional writing unnecessary.

Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing three generations – all unable to escape their pasts. There is the tale of characters Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, moving from the New York borough to a pastoral setting. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the character of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one directionless individual by another in a locality largely deserted by liberal ideals only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in rural Minnesota.

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

As a reader who favors precise prose of the style that Kraus often disregards, I was won over by the literary tone of the first section. There is a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for trivial aspects, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like hard candy". The author narrates Emma's narrative with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this fresh tone could persist to the end. The author states here that she dislikes the enjoyment readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels 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 two different states, failing to help her husband manage his alcohol use. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a society fueled by the anger and fear that powers a political win. A significant portion discusses about Catt's social media ostracism on social media, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. On one occasion she states that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her online critics would not understand, would not even see".

The Killing Story

Then we reach to the murder itself – and the titular day spent by the deceased with the perpetrator and his associates. The author possesses great source material, and details moment by moment what transpired when the victim 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 in the company of her associates, mooching around fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I found myself captivated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who comes alive partly through Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl spiraling out of control in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she fails to enact these dialogues. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par