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This latest work centers on protagonists chasing after clean slates, struggling to escape addictions or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into conflict. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", transforming it into deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" are scattered across the text. Meanwhile, Kraus herself seems to be making her personal new beginning, because this seems a different type of work – documentarian, truly literary. But then it proves to be laden with the recurring issues and approaches as her previous works.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

Chris Kraus was originally an creative who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming personal female narrative from humiliation into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the impact and rawness that the epistolary style imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a renegade artist who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It follows that she presently aims to explore different types of content, turning outward to external narratives, at a time when she states that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing redundant.

Three Generations, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, encompassing multiple eras – each trapped by their pasts. We encounter the tale of Emma and Jasper, versions of Kraus's parents, moving from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a locality mostly forsaken by liberal ideals only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.

As a reader attracted to honed writing of the type Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the literary tone of the opening part.

As someone who reads who favors precise prose of the style that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the first section. It possesses a fresh level of observation that accommodates trivial aspects, like the pail that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her adored dad. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she exclaims; "a great plaything", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like piece candy". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."

Frustration and Disruption

I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this new voice could last out the book. Kraus says here that she resents the satisfaction audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her hero author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels reasserts itself in the middle section. The protagonist is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help Paul manage his alcohol use. She is overwhelmed as her spouse cycles through poorly supported positions as an addiction therapist in a society propelled by the hostility and dread that drives an electoral success. A significant portion discusses about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "real estate holder" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. At one point she states that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".

The Murder Narrative

Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the referenced day spent by the murdered individual with the killer and his friends. Kraus has excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what transpired when Brandon came to visit Brittney after connecting via an application where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day in the company of her associates, wandering about fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt develops an obsession by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. However, I would have preferred her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who gains dimension in part due to the protagonist's connection to her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. This entire part feels oddly unfinished, to the point that her narrative ends almost mid-par