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The new book features individuals seeking fresh starts, attempting to leave behind substance abuse or harmful partnerships, only to witness hope devolve into conflict. Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", rendering it deliberately jaded through recurring use. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the text. Meanwhile, she seems to be making her own fresh start, as this seems a new kind of book – fact-based, authentically narrative. However it proves to be filled with the recurring issues and styles as her previous works.

From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic

Chris Kraus was originally an visual artist who entered the literary world somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming confessional female writing from self-debasement into assassination. She continued writing, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels missed the impact and rawness that the epistolary style brought to the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a nonconformist creator who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It is logical that she presently aims to experiment with fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to external narratives, at a time when she asserts that current political era renders personal narrative redundant.

Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning three generations – none able to break free from their pasts. The book includes the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, moving from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. Additionally the narrative of the author, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband a man named Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a town largely deserted by liberal ideals only a short distance from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader drawn to honed writing of the type Kraus herself often avoids, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the first section.

As someone who reads who appreciates crafted language of the variety that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was captivated by the storytelling approach of the initial part. It exhibits a fresh level of observation that allows space for trivial aspects, like the container that the protagonist as a child dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her adored dad. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". She tells 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 destined to be disappointed when I wished this fresh tone could last out the book. Kraus says here that she dislikes the pleasure readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disruption, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books reasserts itself in the middle section. Catt is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between Minnesota and LA, unable to aid Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a environment driven by the rage and anxiety that drives Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her professional designation altered from "author" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she could potentially understand something about an America that her social media opponents would not understand, would not even perceive".

The Killing Story

Then we reach to the actual killing – and the titular day passed by the victim with the murderer and his friends. Kraus utilizes great source material, and knows hour by hour what happened when a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day with her companions, mooching around having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being murdered by her romantic interest Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized 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 accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The standout figure is Brittney, who gains dimension partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman spiraling out of control in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the point that her narrative ends almost mid-par