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This latest work centers on characters pursuing fresh starts, struggling to escape addictions or toxic relationships, only to witness hope devolve into conflict. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", rendering it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He aimed to start over" and "They opted for a clean break" recur in the text. At the same time, Kraus herself seems to be making her own fresh start, since this seems a novel form of writing – observational, truly literary. However it proves to be filled with the familiar conflicts and styles as earlier books.

From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book

Chris Kraus was originally an creative who transitioned to writing unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating personal female narrative from humiliation into defiance. She kept producing books, but the following three engaging and challenging novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the letter form brought to the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a maverick maker who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It makes sense that she currently desires to experiment with new kinds of material, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a time when she claims that current political era makes confessional writing redundant.

Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning multiple eras – each trapped by their backgrounds. The book includes the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, moving from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. Then there is the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one troubled youth by another in a community long abandoned by liberal ideals only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.

From my perspective as a reader fond of honed writing of the type the author herself tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the first section.

As a reader drawn to crafted language of the kind that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was won over by the novelistic voice of the first section. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that allows space for minutiae, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she exclaims; "a nice toy", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like sweet treats". The author narrates Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not entirely her own."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this fresh tone could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she resents the enjoyment audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to disruption, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels returns in the second segment. The protagonist is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while shuttling between two different states, unsuccessful in assisting Paul control his drinking. She feels helpless as her spouse moves between poorly supported positions as an addiction therapist in a world propelled by the rage and anxiety that drives an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "landlord" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. On one occasion she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would be unable to grasp, would not even see".

The Murder Narrative

Thus we arrive to the actual killing – and the referenced day experienced by the murdered individual with the murderer and his associates. Kraus utilizes compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when the victim Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, mooching around having his vehicle repaired and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who comes alive partly through the protagonist's connection to her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman 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. This entire part feels strangely incomplete, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par