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The Four Spent the Day Together centers on characters chasing after fresh starts, struggling to escape substance abuse or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", making it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Examples include "He aimed to start over" and "They opted for a clean break" are scattered across the text. And yet, the author herself seems to be making her personal new beginning, because this presents as a new kind of book – documentarian, truly literary. However it proves to be filled with the recurring issues and styles as her previous works.

From Chance Novelist to Iconic Work

Chris Kraus started out as an creative who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, structured as epistles to an unresponsive love interest, transforming intimate women's literature from abjection into defiance. She continued writing, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels did not possess the power and directness that the epistolary style imparted to the voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a nonconformist creator who had evolved into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It makes sense that she currently desires to explore different types of content, directing her gaze to the experiences of others, at a time when she asserts that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing unnecessary.

Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering three generations – all unable to escape their histories. The book includes the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, transitioning from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the character of Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband her husband Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a locality largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.

As a reader drawn to honed writing of the kind the author herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the narrative style of the first section.

As someone who reads who favors honed writing of the kind that the author tends to eschew, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the first section. It possesses a fresh level of observation that allows space for minutiae, like the container that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, aided by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". Kraus writes Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was fated to feel let down when I wished this new voice could continue through the novel. The author states here that she resents the pleasure readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her hero author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her past books reasserts itself in the second segment. Catt is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul manage his alcohol use. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through poorly supported positions as an substance abuse counselor in a world fueled by the rage and anxiety that drives Trump's victory. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on social media, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she says that she's looking into the killing so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an the United States 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 eponymous day spent by the murdered individual with the murderer and his associates. Kraus utilizes compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when Brandon came to meet Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, loitering fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being shot by her romantic interest Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her own obsessions here. The standout figure is Brittney herself, who comes alive partly through Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par