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The new book features characters seeking clean slates, attempting to leave behind addictions or harmful partnerships, only to see hope turn into conflict. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "fresh start", transforming it into intentionally weary through recurring use. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the story. Meanwhile, she is embarking on her own fresh start, as this seems a new kind of book – observational, genuinely novelistic. However it reveals itself to be packed with the familiar conflicts and styles as earlier books.

From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic

Kraus began as an creative who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, converting intimate women's literature from humiliation into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a maverick maker who had turned into a extensive real estate holder, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It makes sense that she presently aims to explore different types of content, turning outward to other people's stories, at a time when she asserts that current political era renders personal narrative obsolete.

Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, spanning several time periods – all unable to escape their pasts. There is the narrative about Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, moving from the Bronx to a pastoral setting. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the guise of protagonist Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one directionless individual by another in a community mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in rural Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader attracted to refined literature of the sort Kraus often avoids, I was seduced by the narrative style of the first section.

As a reader drawn to precise prose of the variety that the author usually avoids, I was seduced by the literary tone of the opening segment. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates minutiae, like the bucket that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the start of the story, assisted by her adored dad. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he answers, "the elliptical meanings of words rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". She tells the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this different style could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she dislikes the satisfaction audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disruption, to the untidy aesthetics she has in common with her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works returns in the second segment. Catt is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while moving between Minnesota and LA, unsuccessful in assisting Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a world fueled by the anger and fear that drives Trump's victory. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her listed profession modified from "writer" to "landlord" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. At one point she remarks that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she could potentially understand something about an America that her online critics would not understand, would not even see".

The Homicide Account

Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the titular day spent by the deceased with the killer and his friends. The author possesses great source material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He sought a sexual encounter but seems amiably to have occupied the day with her companions, loitering fixing his automobile and funding treats and narcotics, before being murdered by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt develops an obsession by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. Yet I wished her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who comes alive partly through Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels strangely incomplete, to the point that her narrative ends almost mid-par