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The new book features protagonists seeking new beginnings, struggling to escape substance abuse or toxic relationships, only to see hope turn into violence. Kraus often employs the phrase "new beginning", rendering it willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" appear throughout the text. And yet, the author herself is embarking on her own fresh start, since this presents as a different type of work – documentarian, truly literary. However it proves to be laden with the recurring issues and styles as earlier books.

From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book

Chris Kraus began as an creative who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as missives to a distant beloved, converting personal female narrative from self-debasement into rebellion. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the power and directness that the epistolary style infused into the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a nonconformist creator who had evolved into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It makes sense that she now wants to experiment with different types of content, turning outward to external narratives, at a time when she states that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature redundant.

Multiple Generations, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning several time periods – none able to break free from their pasts. There is the narrative about Emma and Jasper, versions of Kraus's parents, transitioning from the New York borough to a pastoral setting. There is the account of Kraus, in the guise of Catt Greene, confronting the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a locality long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.

As a reader fond of polished prose of the sort the author herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the opening part.

As someone who reads who appreciates precise prose of the variety that Kraus usually avoids, I was seduced by the literary tone of the opening segment. There is a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for small details, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child dislodges from ice at the start of the story, assisted by her adored dad. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like sweet treats". She tells the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this fresh tone could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she resents the pleasure audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her hero Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her earlier works reasserts itself in the middle section. Catt is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between Minnesota and LA, unable to aid her husband control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a world driven by the hostility and dread that powers a political win. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. On one occasion she remarks that she's investigating the murder so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".

The Homicide Account

So then we come to the murder itself – and the titular day spent by the victim with the killer and his companions. The author possesses great source material, and knows hour by hour what happened when Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, mooching around fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt develops an obsession by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and daring boundary-pushing clash in this segment. Yet I wished her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels strangely incomplete, to the point that her narrative ends almost mid-par