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The Four Spent the Day Together centers on individuals seeking new beginnings, struggling to escape substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into violence. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", rendering it willfully cynical through recurring use. Examples include "He aimed to start over" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the narrative. And yet, Kraus herself appears to be undertaking her personal new beginning, as this seems a new kind of book – documentarian, authentically narrative. But then it reveals itself to be laden with the same dilemmas and approaches as past novels.

From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book

The writer began as an artist who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating personal female narrative from self-debasement into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the following three compelling and abrasive novels lacked the power and directness that the epistolary style imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a nonconformist creator who had turned into a major property owner, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It is logical that she now wants to try out new kinds of material, directing her gaze to the experiences of others, at a moment when she asserts that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature obsolete.

Several Eras, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning multiple eras – none able to break free from their pasts. There is the tale of Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, transitioning from the New York borough to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of Catt Greene, confronting the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one directionless individual by another in a locality largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader drawn to refined literature of the kind Kraus tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the opening part.

As a reader who appreciates precise prose of the style that Kraus herself often disregards, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the initial part. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for trivial aspects, like the bucket that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a nice toy", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". She tells the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."

Frustration and Disruption

I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this different style could continue through the novel. The author states here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment those who appreciate polished prose have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her past books reasserts itself in the second segment. The protagonist is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between Minnesota and LA, unable to aid Paul manage his alcohol use. She experiences powerlessness as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a society propelled by the anger and fear that drives a political win. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her occupation changed from "author" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. On one occasion she remarks that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even see".

The Homicide Account

Then we reach to the actual killing – and the titular day passed by the deceased with the murderer and his companions. The author possesses excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, loitering getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.

Fascination and Incompletion

The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and reckless transgression tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who gains dimension in part due to Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par