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The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with characters chasing after clean slates, trying to break free from substance abuse or toxic relationships, only to witness hope devolve into conflict. The author often employs the phrase "clean slate", making it deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the story. Meanwhile, Kraus herself is embarking on her personal new beginning, because this appears a novel form of writing – observational, truly literary. Yet it proves to be packed with the recurring issues and approaches as her previous works.

From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work

Chris Kraus started out as an visual artist who entered the literary world somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating intimate women's literature from abjection into defiance. She kept producing books, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the power and directness that the correspondence format infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a maverick maker who had turned into a extensive real estate holder, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It makes sense that she now wants to try out new kinds of material, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a period in which she asserts that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative unnecessary.

Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering three generations – none able to break free from their backgrounds. The book includes the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, transitioning from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. Then there is the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a locality long abandoned by progressive politics only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.

As a reader attracted to honed writing of the type the author herself typically rejects, I was seduced by the literary tone of the opening part.

Being a reader who favors precise prose of the kind that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was won over by the literary tone of the first section. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for minutiae, like the bucket that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a lovely toy", he answers, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like sweet treats". The author narrates Emma's narrative with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."

Frustration and Disruption

I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this new voice could continue through the novel. The author states here that she resents the pleasure audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her idol author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels returns in the central part. The protagonist is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between Minnesota and LA, unable to aid Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as her spouse moves between low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a world driven by the rage and anxiety that drives a political win. A significant portion discusses about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her occupation changed from "novelist" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she remarks that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even see".

The Killing Story

So then we come to the homicide in question – and the referenced day experienced by the victim with the murderer and his friends. Kraus has great source material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, wandering about getting his car mended and funding treats and narcotics, before being murdered by Brittney's partner Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for aggressive outbursts.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who comes alive partly through Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par