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This latest work centers on characters pursuing fresh starts, attempting to leave behind drugs or toxic relationships, only to see hope turn into conflict. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "new beginning", rendering it deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" recur in the text. At the same time, the author herself is embarking on her own fresh start, as this presents as a new kind of book – documentarian, authentically narrative. But then it turns out to be filled with the recurring issues and aesthetics as her previous works.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

The writer started out as an creative who entered the literary world somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming intimate women's literature from humiliation into defiance. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format imparted to the voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her role as a renegade artist who had turned into a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It is logical that she currently desires to try out fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to external narratives, at a moment when she claims that Trumpian politics makes confessional writing redundant.

Three Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering three generations – none able to break free from their pasts. We encounter the tale of characters Emma and Jasper, representations of Kraus's parents, relocating from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the character of Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a locality largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only 80 miles from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader fond of polished prose of the type the author herself tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the first section.

As someone who reads who favors precise prose of the kind that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the first section. There is a fresh level of observation that allows space for trivial aspects, like the container that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". She tells Emma's narrative with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this fresh tone could last out the book. Kraus says here that she dislikes the pleasure audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her hero Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels reasserts itself in the middle section. Catt Greene is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help her husband curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a society driven by the anger and fear that powers an electoral success. A significant portion discusses about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her professional designation altered from "author" to "real estate holder" on a reference site. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she states that she's looking into the killing so that before leaving Minnesota, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her social media opponents would fail to comprehend, would not even perceive".

The Killing Story

So then we come to the homicide in question – and the referenced day spent by the victim with the murderer and his friends. The author possesses great source material, and details moment by moment what occurred as a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day with her companions, mooching around having his vehicle repaired 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 repeatedly received inpatient care for aggressive outbursts.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt develops an obsession by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to go further into her personal fixations here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par