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The new book centers on characters seeking fresh starts, struggling to escape addictions or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "new beginning", transforming it into intentionally weary through recurring use. Phrases such as "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the text. Meanwhile, Kraus herself appears to be undertaking her individual reinvention, because this appears a new kind of book – documentarian, authentically narrative. But then it proves to be laden with the same dilemmas and approaches as past novels.

From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work

Kraus started out as an artist who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, elevating personal female narrative from self-debasement into rebellion. She continued writing, but the following three engaging and challenging novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style brought to the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her role as a renegade artist who had become a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It follows that she currently desires to explore different types of content, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a period in which she states that current political era renders personal narrative unnecessary.

Three Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, encompassing several time periods – none able to break free from their histories. There is the tale of characters Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, relocating from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. There is the account of Kraus, in the guise of protagonist Catt Greene, confronting the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a locality largely deserted by progressive politics only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.

From my perspective as a reader fond of refined literature of the sort Kraus tends to eschew, I was captivated by the narrative style of the initial segment.

Being a reader who favors precise prose of the kind that Kraus tends to eschew, I was won over 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 beginning of the narrative, helped by her adored dad. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a nice toy", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this different style could last out the book. The author states here that she is annoyed by the pleasure audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her hero author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works returns in the second segment. Catt Greene is working on refurbishing three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help Paul manage his alcohol use. She feels helpless as Paul moves between underfunded jobs as an substance abuse counselor in a environment fueled by the rage and anxiety that underpins a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her occupation changed from "writer" to "landlord" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she says that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she could potentially understand something about an the nation that her online critics would not understand, would not even see".

The Homicide Account

So then we come to the murder itself – and the referenced day spent by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his associates. The author possesses great source material, and details moment by moment what transpired when Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He sought a sexual encounter but seems amiably to have occupied the day in the company of her associates, mooching around getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.

Fascination and Incompletion

The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I found myself captivated by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. Yet I wished her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who comes alive partly through the protagonist's connection to her – another bright, bullied girl spiraling out of control in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the point that her narrative ends almost mid-par