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This latest work is populated with individuals pursuing clean slates, attempting to leave behind drugs or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "fresh start", making it willfully cynical through recurring use. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the story. Meanwhile, Kraus herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, as this presents as a different type of work – documentarian, truly literary. Yet it reveals itself to be laden with the same dilemmas and styles as earlier books.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

Chris Kraus started out as an artist who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as missives to a distant beloved, elevating intimate women's literature from self-debasement into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the following three fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style imparted to the voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her position as a nonconformist creator who had evolved into a extensive real estate holder, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It makes sense that she currently desires to try out new kinds of material, looking outwards to external narratives, at a period in which she claims that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative unnecessary.

Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering three generations – all unable to escape their backgrounds. We encounter the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, transitioning from the Bronx to a pastoral setting. There is the narrative of the author, in the persona of Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction her husband Paul. The third thread involves the story of the murder of one directionless individual by another in a community mostly forsaken by liberal ideals only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.

As a reader drawn 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 precise prose of the style that Kraus tends to eschew, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the first section. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for small details, like the container that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the opening of the book, helped by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a nice toy", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like piece candy". She tells the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was destined to be disappointed when I wished this different style could continue through the novel. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the satisfaction audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the unpolished style she echoes from her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels reasserts itself in the central part. Catt is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between two different states, unable to aid Paul control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as Paul transitions between low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a society propelled by the hostility and dread that drives a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her occupation changed from "author" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. In a moment she states that she's looking into the killing so that before leaving Minnesota, "she might be able to learn something about an America that her social media opponents would fail to comprehend, would not even perceive".

The Killing Story

Then we reach to the murder itself – and the eponymous day experienced by the murdered individual with the killer and his associates. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and details moment by moment what transpired when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she offered adult photos. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day with her companions, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

Catt develops an obsession by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to go further into her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who comes alive in part due to the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that Catt speaks to Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. This entire part feels oddly unfinished, to the point that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par