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The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with individuals chasing after new beginnings, trying to break free from substance abuse or toxic relationships, only to see hope turn into violence. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", making it willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the text. At the same time, she seems to be making her individual reinvention, as this appears a different type of work – documentarian, authentically narrative. Yet it turns out to be packed with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as past novels.

From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book

Chris Kraus was originally an artist who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating confessional female writing from self-debasement into assassination. She kept producing books, but the following three compelling and abrasive novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a nonconformist creator who had evolved into a major property owner, so there was significant attention on real estate deals. It follows that she currently desires to explore fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to external narratives, at a period in which she claims that current political era renders personal narrative obsolete.

Three Generations, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, spanning several time periods – each trapped by their histories. There is the tale of characters Emma and Jasper, versions of the author's parents, transitioning from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. The third thread involves the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a town long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.

For this reader attracted to honed writing of the sort Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the opening part.

As a reader who appreciates crafted language of the style that the author often disregards, I was won over by the novelistic voice of the first section. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that allows space for small details, like the bucket that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a great plaything", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language rolling around in their mouths like sweet treats". She tells Emma's narrative with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this different style could continue through the novel. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the satisfaction audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels reasserts itself in the second segment. The protagonist is working on refurbishing multiple decrepit residences in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a world fueled by the hostility and dread that underpins an electoral success. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her occupation changed from "author" to "real estate holder" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before exiting the region, "she could potentially understand something about an America that her Twitter detractors would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".

The Murder Narrative

Then we reach to the murder itself – and the eponymous day spent by the deceased with the killer and his associates. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and details moment by moment what happened when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He sought a sexual encounter 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 shot by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who gains dimension partly through Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par