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This latest work features characters pursuing new beginnings, struggling to escape addictions or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Chris Kraus frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", rendering it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the text. And yet, Kraus herself is embarking on her personal new beginning, since this appears a different type of work – documentarian, authentically narrative. However it turns out to be laden with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as earlier books.

From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work

The writer began as an creative who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as epistles to an unresponsive love interest, transforming confessional female writing from humiliation into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the impact and rawness that the epistolary style infused into the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a renegade artist who had become a major property owner, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It follows that she now wants to try out fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a moment when she states that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing redundant.

Multiple Generations, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering several time periods – none able to break free from their pasts. There is the tale of Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, relocating from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a locality largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.

For this reader drawn to refined literature of the kind Kraus typically rejects, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the first section.

As a reader drawn to honed writing of the variety that the author often disregards, I was won over by the literary tone of the initial part. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for small details, like the pail that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the start of the story, helped by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like piece candy". She tells Emma's narrative with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."

Frustration and Disruption

I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this different style could last out the book. Kraus says here that she dislikes the enjoyment audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her idol Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels comes back in the central part. Catt Greene is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting Paul control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a society driven by the hostility and dread that drives a political win. A significant portion discusses about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "landlord" on a reference site. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. At one point she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would not even see".

The Killing Story

So then we come to the actual killing – and the eponymous day experienced by the victim with the perpetrator and his companions. Kraus utilizes excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what occurred as Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by her romantic interest Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

Catt develops an obsession by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid in part due to the protagonist's connection to her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par