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The new book features characters seeking fresh starts, attempting to leave behind substance abuse or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into deliberately jaded through recurring use. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the story. Meanwhile, the author herself is embarking on her own fresh start, as this appears a novel form of writing – fact-based, truly literary. But then it turns out to be filled with the same dilemmas and styles as earlier books.

From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work

The writer was originally an artist who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, converting intimate women's literature from humiliation into assassination. She kept producing books, but the following three compelling and abrasive novels lacked the impact and rawness that the epistolary style imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a nonconformist creator who had become a major property owner, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It follows that she currently desires to try out fresh narrative sources, directing her gaze to other people's stories, at a time when she claims that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing unnecessary.

Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering three generations – none able to break free from their pasts. There is the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, transitioning from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. There is the account of Kraus, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction a man named Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a town long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in rural Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader attracted to refined literature of the type Kraus tends to eschew, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the opening part.

As someone who reads who appreciates precise prose of the style that Kraus usually avoids, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the first section. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that allows space for small details, like the pail that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, aided by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a nice toy", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". She tells Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was destined to be disappointed when I hoped this new voice could continue through the novel. Kraus says here that she dislikes the enjoyment readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her hero author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works reasserts itself in the middle section. The protagonist is working on refurbishing three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help her husband control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a society fueled by the rage and anxiety that drives an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her professional designation altered from "author" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. In a moment she says that she's looking into the killing so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn something about an the United States that her social media opponents would be unable to grasp, would not even see".

The Homicide Account

So then we come to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day spent by the murdered individual with the killer and his friends. Kraus utilizes excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what occurred as a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but seems affably to have spent the day in the company of her associates, loitering fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being shot by her romantic interest Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and reckless transgression clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who gains dimension partially because of Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a struggling, neglected community. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par