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This latest work is populated with characters chasing after clean slates, attempting to leave behind drugs or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into violence. Kraus often employs the phrase "fresh start", transforming it into willfully cynical through recurring use. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the text. Meanwhile, Kraus herself is embarking on her own fresh start, since this presents as a novel form of writing – observational, genuinely novelistic. But then it reveals itself to be filled with the same dilemmas and approaches as her previous works.

From Accidental Writer to Iconic Work

Chris Kraus started out as an visual artist who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, transforming personal female narrative from abjection into assassination. She kept producing books, but the following three fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the impact and rawness that the epistolary style brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a maverick maker who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It follows that she currently desires to experiment with new kinds of material, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a period in which she claims that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature obsolete.

Three Generations, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, encompassing several time periods – each trapped by their pasts. The book includes the narrative about Emma and Jasper, versions of Kraus's parents, moving from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. Additionally the narrative of the author, in the guise of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one directionless individual by another in a community mostly forsaken by liberal ideals only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.

As a reader drawn to refined literature of the sort Kraus tends to eschew, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the first section.

As a reader who appreciates precise prose of the kind that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the storytelling approach of the initial part. It possesses a novel degree of detail that accommodates minutiae, like the container that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the start of the story, aided by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like sweet treats". The author narrates Emma's narrative with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was destined to be disappointed when I wished this fresh tone could last out the book. Kraus says here that she resents the satisfaction readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she echoes from her hero Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels returns in the second segment. Catt Greene is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between two different states, unable to aid Paul curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as her spouse cycles through low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a environment propelled by the hostility and dread that underpins a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she states that she's investigating the murder so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn something about an the United States that her social media opponents would not understand, would not even perceive".

The Killing Story

So then we come to the murder itself – and the eponymous day spent by the deceased with the perpetrator and his friends. Kraus has great source material, and knows hour by hour what happened when Brandon came to meet Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, wandering about getting his car mended and funding treats and narcotics, before being shot by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl spiraling out of control in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par