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This latest work centers on individuals pursuing new beginnings, struggling to escape substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into conflict. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", making it willfully cynical through recurring use. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" recur in the narrative. Meanwhile, the author herself is embarking on her own fresh start, since this seems a novel form of writing – fact-based, truly literary. However it reveals itself to be laden with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as her previous works.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

The writer started out as an visual artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating personal female narrative from humiliation into rebellion. She continued writing, but the following three compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the power and directness that the epistolary style infused into the voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her role as a maverick maker who had become a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It follows that she currently desires to explore fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a time when she asserts that current political era renders personal narrative redundant.

Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning three generations – each trapped by their backgrounds. We encounter the story of Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, relocating from the Bronx to a pastoral setting. There is the account of Kraus, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a community long abandoned by progressive politics only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.

From my perspective as a reader fond of honed writing of the type Kraus herself often avoids, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the opening part.

Being a reader drawn to precise prose of the kind that the author tends to eschew, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the first section. It exhibits a fresh level of observation that allows space for minutiae, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the opening of the book, aided by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a nice toy", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language rolling around in their mouths like hard candy". Kraus writes the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this new voice could last out the book. Kraus says here that she dislikes the enjoyment readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disruption, to the unpolished style she has in common with her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels comes back in the middle section. Catt Greene is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting Paul curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as her spouse cycles through low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a environment fueled by the anger and fear that drives a political win. A significant portion discusses about Catt's social media ostracism on social media, her occupation changed from "author" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she states that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she could potentially understand something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would overlook entirely".

The Murder Narrative

Then we reach to the murder itself – and the referenced day experienced by the murdered individual with the killer and his companions. Kraus has excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what transpired when a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after connecting via an application where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day in the company of her associates, loitering fixing his automobile and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I found myself captivated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to go further into her personal fixations here. The standout figure is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par