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This latest work is populated with characters seeking fresh starts, struggling to escape drugs or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into conflict. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", rendering it deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Examples include "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the text. And yet, Kraus herself is embarking on her individual reinvention, as this presents as a novel form of writing – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. However it turns out to be laden with the recurring issues and styles as her previous works.

From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work

Chris Kraus began as an artist who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating confessional female writing from abjection into assassination. She kept producing books, but the following three engaging and challenging novels missed the power and directness that the correspondence format imparted to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her role as a maverick maker who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on real estate deals. It makes sense that she currently desires to try out new kinds of material, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a time when she states that Trumpian politics renders personal narrative redundant.

Three Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning several time periods – none able to break free from their histories. There is the story of characters Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, relocating from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. Additionally the account of Kraus, in the guise of Catt Greene, confronting the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one directionless individual by another in a community mostly forsaken by progressive politics only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.

For this reader fond of polished prose of the kind Kraus tends to eschew, I was captivated by the narrative style of the first section.

As someone who reads drawn to precise prose of the variety that the author usually avoids, I was seduced by the literary tone of the opening segment. It exhibits a fresh level of observation that makes room for trivial aspects, like the pail that the protagonist as a child dislodges from ice at the start of the story, assisted by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a great plaything", he answers, "the nuanced interpretations of terms tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". The author narrates Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this different style could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the satisfaction readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the unpolished style she has in common with her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works comes back in the central part. Catt is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between Minnesota and LA, unsuccessful in assisting her husband curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul transitions between low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a environment propelled by the hostility and dread that drives a political win. A significant portion discusses about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "landlord" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. On one occasion she states that she's looking into the killing so that before leaving Minnesota, "she might be able to learn something about an America that her social media opponents would not understand, would not even see".

The Killing Story

So then we come to the homicide in question – and the referenced day passed by the deceased with the murderer and his friends. Kraus utilizes compelling foundational content, and knows hour by hour what transpired when the victim Brandon came to visit Brittney after connecting via an application where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day with her companions, 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 repeatedly received inpatient care for aggressive outbursts.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who gains dimension partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the point that her narrative ends almost mid-par