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The new book features protagonists seeking fresh starts, attempting to leave behind addictions or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into violence. Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", rendering it intentionally weary through its repetitions. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the text. At the same time, Kraus herself seems to be making her personal new beginning, because this appears a novel form of writing – documentarian, authentically narrative. However it turns out to be packed with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as earlier books.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

Chris Kraus started out as an visual artist who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, transforming confessional female writing from humiliation into rebellion. She continued writing, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels missed the impact and rawness that the correspondence format imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a maverick maker who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It follows that she presently aims to explore new kinds of material, turning outward to external narratives, at a period in which she states that current political era makes confessional writing obsolete.

Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering several time periods – each trapped by their pasts. The book includes the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, relocating from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. Additionally the narrative of the author, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a community mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.

For this reader drawn to honed writing of the kind the author herself tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the first section.

Being a reader who favors honed writing of the style that the author often disregards, I was captivated by the storytelling approach of the first section. It possesses a novel degree of detail that accommodates trivial aspects, like the pail that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the opening of the book, helped by her cherished parent. "I found an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a great plaything", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". She tells the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."

Frustration and Disruption

I was destined to be disappointed when I wished this fresh tone could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the satisfaction audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to disruption, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels reasserts itself in the middle section. Catt is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between two different states, failing to help Paul manage his alcohol use. She experiences powerlessness as Paul cycles through underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a society fueled by the hostility and dread that drives a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears 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

Thus we arrive to the actual killing – and the titular day spent by the victim with the murderer and his companions. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and details moment by moment what occurred as a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He sought a sexual encounter but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, mooching around getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has often been institutionalized 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 responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to go further into her own obsessions here. The standout figure is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partly through Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par