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The new book features protagonists pursuing new beginnings, attempting to leave behind drugs or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into violence. The author often employs the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into willfully cynical through its repetitions. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They opted for a clean break" recur in the story. And yet, the author herself is embarking on her individual reinvention, as this seems a different type of work – fact-based, truly literary. But then it turns out to be packed with the familiar conflicts and styles as past novels.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

Chris Kraus was originally an visual artist who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, transforming personal female narrative from abjection into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the impact and rawness that the epistolary style brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a renegade artist who had turned into a extensive real estate holder, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It follows that she now wants to try out new kinds of material, directing her gaze to the experiences of others, at a period in which she asserts that contemporary political climate turns intimate literature redundant.

Three Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, encompassing three generations – all unable to escape their backgrounds. We encounter the story of characters Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, moving from the New York borough to the Connecticut countryside. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a town long abandoned by progressive politics only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.

For this reader attracted to refined literature of the sort Kraus typically rejects, I was captivated by the narrative style of the initial segment.

Being a reader drawn to honed writing of the variety that Kraus often disregards, I was won over by the novelistic voice of the first section. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that allows space for small details, like the container that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the opening of the book, assisted by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a great plaything", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like hard candy". Kraus writes Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was destined to be disappointed when I wished this different style could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the satisfaction audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the unpolished style she has in common with her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels reasserts itself in the second segment. Catt is working on refurbishing three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting Paul manage his alcohol use. She experiences powerlessness as her spouse moves between low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a environment driven by the anger and fear that underpins an electoral success. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on social media, her occupation changed from "writer" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. On one occasion she states that she's investigating the murder so that before exiting the region, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would overlook entirely".

The Killing Story

Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the eponymous day passed by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his companions. Kraus utilizes compelling foundational content, and details moment by moment what happened when the victim Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He sought a sexual encounter but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, wandering about fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt develops an obsession by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partially because of Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels oddly unfinished, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par