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This latest work is populated with characters seeking fresh starts, trying to break free from addictions or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into violence. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", making it deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Phrases such as "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the text. Meanwhile, she appears to be undertaking her individual reinvention, because this seems a different type of work – documentarian, authentically narrative. But then it turns out to be filled with the recurring issues and aesthetics as past novels.

From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic

Chris Kraus was originally an creative who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, converting intimate women's literature from humiliation into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format infused into the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a renegade artist who had turned into a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It follows that she now wants to try out fresh narrative sources, turning outward to the experiences of others, at a period in which she asserts that Trumpian politics renders personal narrative redundant.

Multiple Generations, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, encompassing several time periods – all unable to escape their histories. There is the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, relocating from the New York borough to a pastoral setting. Additionally the account of Kraus, in the character of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a community long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in a remote part of Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader attracted to refined literature of the sort the author herself typically rejects, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the opening part.

Being a reader drawn to precise prose of the variety that the author usually avoids, I was won over by the literary tone of the initial part. There is a fresh level of observation that accommodates minutiae, like the container that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like piece candy". The author narrates the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was fated to feel let down when I expected this fresh tone could continue through the novel. Kraus says here that she resents the pleasure those who appreciate polished prose have derived from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disruption, to the unpolished style she echoes from her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her past books returns in the middle section. The protagonist is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help her husband manage his alcohol use. She is overwhelmed as her spouse moves between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a environment propelled by the hostility and dread that drives an electoral success. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on social media, her occupation changed from "writer" to "real estate holder" on a reference site. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. In a moment she says that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she could potentially understand something about an the nation that her online critics would not understand, would not even see".

The Murder Narrative

Thus we arrive to the actual killing – and the eponymous day experienced by the victim with the killer and his friends. The author possesses excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what occurred as a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after connecting via an application where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day in the company of her associates, wandering about fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by her romantic interest Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to go further into her own obsessions here. The standout figure is Brittney, who gains dimension partly through Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels oddly unfinished, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par