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The Four Spent the Day Together features individuals chasing after fresh starts, struggling to escape substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into violence. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", making it willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" recur in the text. Meanwhile, she seems to be making her own fresh start, because this seems a novel form of writing – observational, genuinely novelistic. Yet it proves to be packed with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as her previous works.

From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic

Kraus was originally an artist who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, structured as epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating personal female narrative from abjection into defiance. She continued writing, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the letter form imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her role as a maverick maker who had evolved into a extensive real estate holder, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It follows that she now wants to explore fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a moment when she states that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative redundant.

Several Eras, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, encompassing several time periods – all unable to escape their pasts. We encounter the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, relocating from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. There is the account of Kraus, in the guise of Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction her husband Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a locality mostly forsaken by progressive politics only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.

For this reader drawn to honed writing of the kind Kraus typically rejects, I was seduced by the narrative style of the first section.

Being a reader who favors precise prose of the style that Kraus tends to eschew, I was won over by the literary tone of the opening segment. There is a novel degree of detail that accommodates minutiae, like the container that the young Catt frees from the ice at the start of the story, helped by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a lovely toy", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". She tells the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this new voice could last out the book. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the unpolished style she shares with her idol author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels reasserts itself in the second segment. The protagonist is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help her husband curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul cycles through underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a world fueled by the hostility and dread that drives a political win. A significant portion discusses about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "property owner" on a reference site. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. On one occasion 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 fail to comprehend, would overlook entirely".

The Killing Story

Then we reach to the actual killing – and the referenced day spent by the murdered individual with the killer and his associates. Kraus has compelling foundational content, and knows hour by hour what happened when the victim Brandon came to meet Brittney after connecting via an application where she offered adult photos. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, loitering fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt develops an obsession by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her individual preoccupations here. The standout figure is Brittney herself, who gains dimension partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. The author informs us that Catt speaks to Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the point that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par