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The new book is populated with individuals chasing after fresh starts, struggling to escape addictions or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Chris Kraus frequently uses the phrase "new beginning", making it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the story. Meanwhile, the author herself is embarking on her own fresh start, because this seems a different type of work – observational, authentically narrative. However it reveals itself to be packed with the same dilemmas and styles as earlier books.

From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic

The writer started out as an artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, structured as epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating confessional female writing from abjection into rebellion. She continued writing, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the letter form infused into the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her role as a renegade artist who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on real estate deals. It makes sense that she presently aims to explore fresh narrative sources, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a period in which she asserts that contemporary political climate turns intimate literature obsolete.

Several Eras, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering three generations – all unable to escape their pasts. There is the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, relocating from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. Additionally the account of Kraus, in the character of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one directionless individual by another in a community largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.

For this reader fond of honed writing of the kind Kraus often avoids, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the opening part.

As a reader drawn to precise prose of the style that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was won over by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. There is a fresh level of observation that makes room for trivial aspects, like the pail that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the opening of the book, helped by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a nice toy", he answers, "the elliptical meanings of words 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."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was fated to feel let down when I expected this new voice could continue through the novel. Kraus says here that she dislikes the enjoyment audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the unpolished style she shares with her idol Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books comes back in the second segment. Catt is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between two different states, unsuccessful in assisting Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as Paul moves between poorly supported positions as an addiction therapist in a society fueled by the anger and fear that underpins an electoral success. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on social media, her listed profession modified from "author" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. In a moment she states that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an the nation that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".

The Killing Story

Then we reach to the murder itself – and the eponymous day experienced by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his companions. Kraus has great source material, and knows hour by hour what occurred as 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 amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, mooching around fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.

Fascination and Incompletion

The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par