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This latest work features individuals chasing after clean slates, struggling to escape drugs or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into conflict. The author frequently uses the phrase "new beginning", transforming it into deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the text. And yet, she seems to be making her personal new beginning, since this presents as a different type of work – documentarian, authentically narrative. Yet it reveals itself to be filled with the familiar conflicts and styles as past novels.

From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book

Chris Kraus started out as an artist who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating intimate women's literature from abjection into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format brought to the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a renegade artist who had evolved into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It follows that she currently desires to explore new kinds of material, directing her gaze to other people's stories, at a moment when she claims that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative unnecessary.

Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering three generations – none able to break free from their pasts. There is the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, versions of the author's parents, transitioning from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the character of Catt Greene, confronting the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a town largely deserted by progressive politics only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.

For this reader drawn to refined literature of the sort Kraus tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the first section.

As a reader who appreciates precise prose of the variety that the author often disregards, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the initial part. It possesses 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, aided by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a great plaything", he answers, "the elliptical meanings of words rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". She tells the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."

Frustration and Disruption

I was fated to feel let down when I hoped this new voice could last out the book. Kraus says here that she dislikes the satisfaction audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels returns in the central part. Catt Greene is working on refurbishing three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between Minnesota and LA, unable to aid Paul manage his alcohol use. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between poorly supported positions as an recovery specialist in a world fueled by the hostility and dread that drives a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her occupation changed from "writer" to "property owner" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. In a moment she says that she's looking into the killing so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her social media opponents would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".

The Homicide Account

So then we come to the actual killing – and the referenced day experienced by the deceased with the murderer and his associates. Kraus has excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He sought a sexual encounter but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, loitering having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being shot by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for aggressive outbursts.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

Catt develops an obsession by the account, and I found myself captivated by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to go further into her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who gains dimension in part due to Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman spiraling out of control in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par