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The Four Spent the Day Together features protagonists chasing after clean slates, attempting to leave behind drugs or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "new beginning", transforming it into deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the text. And yet, Kraus herself is embarking on her own fresh start, because this seems a new kind of book – observational, genuinely novelistic. But then it proves to be laden with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as past novels.

From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic

Kraus was originally an creative who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, converting confessional female writing from humiliation into rebellion. She kept producing books, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a renegade artist who had turned into a major property owner, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It makes sense that she currently desires to experiment with new kinds of material, looking outwards to external narratives, at a time when she claims that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing obsolete.

Several Eras, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, encompassing three generations – all unable to escape their pasts. We encounter the story of Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, moving from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. Additionally the account of Kraus, in the guise of Catt Greene, grappling with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her addict husband Paul. The third thread involves the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a town mostly forsaken by progressive politics only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.

As a reader drawn to refined literature of the sort the author herself often avoids, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the opening part.

Being a reader who favors crafted language of the style that Kraus herself often disregards, I was won over by the literary tone of the initial part. It possesses a novel degree of detail that allows space for small details, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child dislodges from ice at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a great plaything", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". She tells Emma's story with interest and closeness. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."

Frustration and Disruption

I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this fresh tone could persist to the end. The author states here that she is annoyed by the satisfaction readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works reasserts itself in the middle section. Catt is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between Minnesota and LA, failing to help her husband control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as her spouse moves between low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a environment fueled by the anger and fear that powers an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on social media, her listed profession modified from "writer" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. At one point she states that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would be unable to grasp, would overlook entirely".

The Murder Narrative

Then we reach to the murder itself – and the referenced day experienced by the murdered individual with the murderer and his associates. Kraus utilizes compelling foundational content, and details moment by moment what transpired when the victim Brandon came to meet Brittney after connecting via an application where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. Yet I wished her to go further into her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who gains dimension in part due to Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par