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This latest work centers on individuals chasing after fresh starts, trying to break free from addictions or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "fresh start", making it deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the narrative. And yet, she is embarking on her personal new beginning, since this seems a new kind of book – fact-based, truly literary. But then it turns out to be filled with the familiar conflicts and approaches as past novels.

From Accidental Writer to Iconic Work

Kraus was originally an artist who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, converting personal female narrative from self-debasement into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the power and directness that the correspondence format infused into the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a maverick maker who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It follows that she currently desires to try out new kinds of material, directing her gaze to other people's stories, at a time when she states that current political era renders personal narrative obsolete.

Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning multiple eras – each trapped by their backgrounds. The book includes the story of characters Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, transitioning from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a town largely deserted by progressive politics only 80 miles from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.

As a reader attracted to polished prose of the sort Kraus herself typically rejects, I was captivated by the narrative style of the initial segment.

Being a reader who favors crafted language of the kind that the author tends to eschew, I was won over by the novelistic voice of the first section. There is a novel degree of detail that makes room for small details, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her cherished parent. "I found an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a great plaything", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". Kraus writes the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not entirely her own."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the pleasure readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books reasserts itself in the middle section. Catt is attempting to do up multiple decrepit residences in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as her spouse moves between low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a society propelled by the hostility and dread that drives a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. At one point she states that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she could potentially understand something about an America that her Twitter detractors would fail to comprehend, would overlook entirely".

The Killing Story

So then we come to the murder itself – and the referenced day spent by the victim with the killer and his friends. Kraus has compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what happened when a man named Brandon came to visit 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, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by her romantic interest Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who comes alive in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the point that her narrative ends almost mid-par