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This latest work features characters chasing after clean slates, trying to break free from substance abuse or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into conflict. The author repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", rendering it intentionally weary through recurring use. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the text. And yet, the author herself is embarking on her individual reinvention, since this seems a novel form of writing – observational, truly literary. Yet it reveals itself to be filled with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as past novels.

From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book

Chris Kraus started out as an creative who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, transforming confessional female writing from humiliation into defiance. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the impact and rawness that the correspondence format brought to the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a maverick maker who had evolved into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It follows that she now wants to explore fresh narrative sources, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a time when she states that Trumpian politics renders personal narrative obsolete.

Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning three generations – each trapped by their histories. We encounter the story of characters Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, relocating from the New York borough to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the character of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a community largely deserted by progressive politics only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in a remote part of Minnesota.

As a reader fond of polished prose of the kind Kraus typically rejects, I was captivated by the literary tone of the opening part.

As a reader who appreciates precise prose of the kind that the author usually avoids, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. There is a fresh level of observation that accommodates small details, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the start of the story, helped by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a great plaything", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". Kraus writes Emma's story with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not entirely her own."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was destined to be disappointed when I hoped this new voice could last out the book. Kraus says here that she resents the enjoyment audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works reasserts itself in the second segment. The protagonist is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between Minnesota and LA, unable to aid Paul manage his alcohol use. She is overwhelmed as her spouse cycles through poorly supported positions as an addiction therapist in a society driven by the hostility and dread that underpins a political win. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. In a moment she states that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she could potentially understand something about an America that her Twitter detractors would fail to comprehend, would not even perceive".

The Homicide Account

Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the titular day experienced by the deceased with the murderer and his associates. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and knows hour by hour what happened when the victim Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, wandering about fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for aggressive outbursts.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

Catt develops an obsession by the story, and I found myself captivated by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the point that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par