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The Four Spent the Day Together centers on protagonists chasing after new beginnings, struggling to escape addictions or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into conflict. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", making it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Examples include "He aimed to start over" and "They opted for a clean break" recur in the text. And yet, Kraus herself is embarking on her own fresh start, because this presents as a different type of work – fact-based, truly literary. But then it turns out to be packed with the same dilemmas and styles as past novels.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

Chris Kraus was originally an visual artist who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming confessional female writing from abjection into rebellion. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels missed the power and directness that the epistolary style brought to the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a renegade artist who had turned into a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It follows that she presently aims to explore new kinds of material, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a moment when she claims that current political era turns intimate literature redundant.

Multiple Generations, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering multiple eras – all unable to escape their pasts. The book includes the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, representations of Kraus's parents, transitioning from the New York borough to the Connecticut countryside. There is the narrative of the author, in the character of a figure named 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. And there is the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a town mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.

As a reader drawn to honed writing of the sort the author herself typically rejects, I was captivated by the narrative style of the opening part.

Being a reader drawn to precise prose of the variety that the author often disregards, I was seduced by the literary tone of the initial part. There is a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for minutiae, like the bucket that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the opening of the book, helped by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a great plaything", he replies, "the nuanced interpretations of terms tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". The author narrates the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not entirely her own."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this different style could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she dislikes the pleasure readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books comes back in the second segment. Catt Greene is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a society fueled by the rage and anxiety that underpins Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her occupation changed from "writer" to "property owner" on a reference site. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she states that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she might be able to learn something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would be unable to grasp, would not even see".

The Killing Story

Thus we arrive to the actual killing – and the eponymous day spent by the deceased with the murderer and his associates. Kraus has compelling foundational content, and details moment by moment what occurred as a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day with her companions, mooching around having his vehicle repaired and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The standout figure is Brittney herself, who gains dimension in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl spiraling out of control in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels oddly unfinished, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par