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The new book centers on individuals seeking new beginnings, struggling to escape substance abuse or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into conflict. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", rendering it willfully cynical through recurring use. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" appear throughout the narrative. And yet, Kraus herself appears to be undertaking her individual reinvention, as this presents as a different type of work – documentarian, truly literary. But then it proves to be laden with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as earlier books.

From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work

Chris Kraus started out as an creative who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming intimate women's literature from abjection into defiance. She kept producing books, but the following three fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the power and directness that the letter form brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a renegade artist who had evolved into a major property owner, so there was much discussion on real estate deals. It is logical that she presently aims to try out different types of content, looking outwards to external narratives, at a period in which she claims that current political era makes confessional writing redundant.

Several Eras, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, encompassing three generations – all unable to escape their pasts. We encounter the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, transitioning from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. Finally the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a town mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in a remote part of Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader fond of honed writing of the kind the author herself typically rejects, I was captivated by the narrative style of the opening part.

Being a reader who favors crafted language of the style that Kraus herself often disregards, I was won over by the literary tone of the first section. It possesses a novel degree of detail that accommodates trivial aspects, like the pail that the young Catt frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a lovely toy", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like sweet treats". 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 hoped this different style could last out the book. Kraus says here that she resents the pleasure audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the unpolished style she echoes from her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels returns in the middle section. Catt Greene is working on refurbishing three dozen dilapidated units in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid Paul curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a world driven by the rage and anxiety that powers an electoral success. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on social media, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "landlord" on a reference site. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she says that she's looking into the killing so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an America that her Twitter detractors would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".

The Homicide Account

Then we reach to the actual killing – and the referenced day passed by the victim with the murderer and his companions. Kraus utilizes compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what occurred as a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after connecting via an application where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, mooching around having his vehicle repaired and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has repeatedly received inpatient care for aggressive outbursts.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

Catt develops an obsession by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par