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The Four Spent the Day Together centers on characters seeking fresh starts, struggling to escape drugs or harmful partnerships, only to see hope turn into conflict. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", rendering it willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the story. And yet, she seems to be making her own fresh start, because this presents as a different type of work – documentarian, truly literary. However it reveals itself to be laden with the familiar conflicts and styles as past novels.

From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book

The writer was originally an visual artist who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating confessional female writing from humiliation into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the impact and rawness that the letter form infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her position as a maverick maker who had turned into a extensive real estate holder, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It makes sense that she now wants to explore different types of content, directing her gaze to other people's stories, at a moment when she states that current political era renders personal narrative redundant.

Three Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering three generations – each trapped by their histories. There is the story of Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, moving from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. Additionally the account of Kraus, in the persona of Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one directionless individual by another in a community long abandoned by progressive politics only 80 miles from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader fond of refined literature of the kind Kraus tends to eschew, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the first section.

As someone who reads who appreciates honed writing of the variety that the author tends to eschew, I was won over by the literary tone of the initial part. It possesses a novel degree of detail that makes room for small details, like the bucket that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the nuanced interpretations of terms tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". The author narrates the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was fated to feel let down when I expected this fresh tone could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she resents the pleasure readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disruption, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her idol Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels reasserts itself in the second segment. Catt is attempting to do up multiple decrepit residences in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a environment driven by the rage and anxiety that powers an electoral success. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on social media, her professional designation altered from "author" to "real estate holder" on a reference site. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. At one point she says that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her social media opponents would be unable to grasp, would overlook entirely".

The Homicide Account

Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the referenced day spent by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his friends. Kraus has excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, loitering fixing his automobile and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to go further into her own obsessions here. The standout figure is Brittney herself, who comes alive partly through Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par