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The new book is populated with characters seeking fresh starts, attempting to leave behind drugs or toxic relationships, only to witness hope devolve into conflict. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", rendering it deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the story. Meanwhile, she seems to be making her own fresh start, since this appears a new kind of book – documentarian, truly literary. But then it turns out to be filled with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as past novels.

From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book

Chris Kraus began as an creative who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating personal female narrative from humiliation into rebellion. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked 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 evolved into a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It follows that she presently aims 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 obsolete.

Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, encompassing three generations – all unable to escape their histories. We encounter the tale of Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, transitioning from the urban environment to a pastoral setting. There is the narrative of the author, in the character of Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband a man named Paul. Finally the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a town long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.

As a reader attracted to polished prose of the type Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the first section.

As a reader who favors crafted language of the style that Kraus herself often disregards, I was seduced by the literary tone of the initial part. There is a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for trivial aspects, like the bucket that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her adored dad. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a nice toy", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". She tells the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this different style could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the pleasure readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disruption, to the unpolished style she shares with her idol author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works returns in the second segment. Catt is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while moving between Minnesota and LA, failing to help her husband manage his alcohol use. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a world propelled by the hostility and dread that powers a political win. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to be overly concerned about this. In a moment she says that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an the United States that her social media opponents would not understand, would overlook entirely".

The Murder Narrative

Then we reach to the actual killing – and the titular day experienced by the murdered individual with the murderer and his associates. The author possesses great source material, and knows hour by hour what transpired when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, mooching around getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I found myself captivated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who comes alive in part due to the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels oddly unfinished, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par