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This latest work centers on protagonists seeking new beginnings, struggling to escape drugs or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into violence. Chris Kraus frequently uses the phrase "fresh start", making it deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the story. Meanwhile, Kraus herself seems to be making her own fresh start, as this appears a different type of work – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. However it reveals itself to be laden with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as past novels.

From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book

The writer was originally an creative who entered the literary world somewhat by chance with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, converting confessional female writing from abjection into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format brought to the voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her position as a renegade artist who had turned into a major property owner, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It makes sense that she presently aims to explore different types of content, looking outwards to external narratives, at a period in which she asserts that current political era makes confessional writing redundant.

Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning three generations – none able to break free from their histories. There is the narrative about Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, relocating from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. There is the account of Kraus, in the character of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her partner struggling with addiction her husband Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a town largely deserted by progressive politics only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in rural Minnesota.

For this reader drawn to polished prose of the type the author herself typically rejects, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.

As a reader who favors precise prose of the kind that the author often disregards, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the initial part. It possesses a novel degree of detail that allows space for small details, like the pail that the young Catt frees from the ice at the opening of the book, assisted by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a great plaything", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language rolling around in their mouths like hard candy". Kraus writes Emma's story with interest and closeness. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."

Frustration and Disruption

I was fated to feel let down when I hoped this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the satisfaction those who appreciate polished prose have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she has in common with her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works comes back in the second segment. The protagonist is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid her husband control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a society driven by the rage and anxiety that powers a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on social media, her professional designation altered from "author" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she states that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn something about an the United States that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would overlook entirely".

The Murder Narrative

Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the eponymous day spent by the murdered individual with the murderer and his companions. The author possesses great source material, and knows hour by hour what happened when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He was hoping for sex but seems affably to have spent the day in the company of her associates, loitering getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for aggressive outbursts.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The standout figure is Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par