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The Four Spent the Day Together centers on characters pursuing fresh starts, struggling to escape substance abuse or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into willfully cynical through recurring use. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" appear throughout the text. At the same time, she is embarking on her individual reinvention, because this seems a novel form of writing – fact-based, authentically narrative. However it turns out to be laden with the recurring issues and styles as past novels.

From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book

Kraus began as an visual artist who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, converting intimate women's literature from abjection into assassination. She continued writing, but the following three compelling and abrasive 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 renegade artist who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on real estate deals. It is logical that she presently aims to try out fresh narrative sources, turning outward to external narratives, at a moment when she states that current political era renders personal narrative redundant.

Multiple Generations, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning three generations – all unable to escape their backgrounds. There is the narrative about Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, relocating from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband a man named Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a locality largely deserted by liberal ideals only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.

From my perspective as a reader attracted to honed writing of the kind Kraus herself typically rejects, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.

As a reader drawn to precise prose of the style that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the first section. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that accommodates minutiae, like the container that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she exclaims; "a great plaything", he answers, "the nuanced interpretations of terms tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". She tells Emma's story with interest and closeness. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was fated to feel let down when I expected this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she resents the satisfaction those who appreciate polished prose have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the unpolished style she echoes from her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels comes back in the second segment. Catt is attempting to do up multiple decrepit residences in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a world driven by the anger and fear that powers an electoral success. A significant portion discusses about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her occupation changed from "author" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an America that her Twitter detractors would fail to comprehend, would not even perceive".

The Killing Story

Thus we arrive to the homicide in question – and the referenced day experienced by the victim with the killer and his associates. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day in the company of her associates, wandering about getting his car mended and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner 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 story, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who comes alive partly through Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the point that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par