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This latest work is populated with individuals chasing after fresh starts, trying to break free from substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into violence. Kraus frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They opted for a clean break" are scattered across the text. And yet, she seems to be making her individual reinvention, because this seems a new kind of book – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. However it reveals itself to be laden with the familiar conflicts and styles as past novels.

From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic

Chris Kraus began as an artist who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting confessional female writing from self-debasement into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the following three fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the power and directness that the correspondence format imparted to the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a maverick maker who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It makes sense that she currently desires to try out fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to external narratives, at a period in which she states that current political era turns intimate literature redundant.

Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning multiple eras – each trapped by their backgrounds. The book includes the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, transitioning from the urban environment to a pastoral setting. Additionally the account of Kraus, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a town largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.

As a reader fond of polished prose of the type the author herself tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the opening part.

As someone who reads drawn to honed writing of the kind that Kraus herself often disregards, I was seduced by the literary tone of the first section. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for minutiae, like the container that the protagonist as a child dislodges from ice at the start of the story, aided by her adored dad. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a nice toy", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". The author narrates the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."

Frustration and Disruption

I was fated to feel let down when I wished this fresh tone could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the pleasure audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she has in common with her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works returns in the second segment. The protagonist is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help her husband curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as her spouse cycles through low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a world fueled by the hostility and dread that powers a political win. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her occupation changed from "novelist" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. In a moment she remarks that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she might be able to learn something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even see".

The Murder Narrative

Thus we arrive to the homicide in question – and the referenced day spent by the victim with the killer and his associates. Kraus utilizes excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what happened when a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after connecting via an application where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par