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This latest work features individuals chasing after fresh starts, struggling to escape substance abuse or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into conflict. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", making it deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the story. And yet, the author herself appears to be undertaking her own fresh start, because this presents as a novel form of writing – documentarian, truly literary. Yet it proves to be filled with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as her previous works.

From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book

The writer began as an artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming confessional female writing from humiliation into assassination. She kept producing books, but the following three engaging and challenging novels lacked the power and directness that the correspondence format infused into the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a maverick maker who had turned into a extensive real estate holder, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It makes sense that she now wants to try out new kinds of material, turning outward to other people's stories, at a time when she asserts that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature obsolete.

Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, encompassing multiple eras – all unable to escape their pasts. The book includes the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, transitioning from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. Then there is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a community mostly forsaken by progressive politics only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in rural Minnesota.

For this reader fond of polished prose of the sort the author herself often avoids, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the initial segment.

As someone who reads drawn to crafted language of the style that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the first section. There is a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for small details, like the bucket that the young Catt frees from the ice at the start of the story, helped by her adored dad. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a nice toy", he answers, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". The author narrates Emma's story with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this different style could persist to the end. The author states here that she resents the enjoyment audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the unpolished style she has in common with her inspiration Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books returns in the middle section. Catt Greene is working on refurbishing three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between Minnesota and LA, unsuccessful in assisting Paul control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a world fueled by the rage and anxiety that underpins Trump's victory. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on social media, her occupation changed from "author" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to be overly concerned about this. At one point she remarks that she's investigating the murder so that before departing the state, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would overlook entirely".

The Homicide Account

Then we reach to the murder itself – and the referenced day passed by the victim with the killer and his companions. The author possesses excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when the victim Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day with her companions, wandering about getting his car mended and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a individual with mental health challenges 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 Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to explore more thoroughly her own obsessions here. The standout figure is Brittney herself, who comes alive partly through Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par