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This latest work is populated with protagonists chasing after fresh starts, attempting to leave behind drugs or harmful partnerships, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", rendering it deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They opted for a clean break" are scattered across the story. At the same time, the author herself seems to be making her own fresh start, since this appears a novel form of writing – documentarian, authentically narrative. But then it proves to be packed with the familiar conflicts and styles as earlier books.

From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book

Chris Kraus started out as an visual artist who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming confessional female writing from abjection into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a renegade artist who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It follows that she presently aims to explore different types of content, looking outwards to external narratives, at a time when she claims that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing redundant.

Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, encompassing multiple eras – none able to break free from their histories. We encounter the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, transitioning from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. Additionally the narrative of the author, in the guise of Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. Finally the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a locality long abandoned by liberal ideals only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.

For this reader attracted to honed writing of the kind the author herself often avoids, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the opening part.

As a reader who appreciates crafted language of the variety that the author tends to eschew, I was captivated by the storytelling approach of the first section. There is a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for small details, like the container that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a great plaything", he answers, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like hard candy". The author narrates Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not entirely her own."

Frustration and Disruption

I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this fresh tone could last out the book. The author states here that she resents the pleasure audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disruption, to the unpolished style she has in common with her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her past books reasserts itself in the second segment. The protagonist is attempting to do up multiple decrepit residences in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting Paul control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a environment propelled by the rage and anxiety that underpins a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she states that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even perceive".

The Killing Story

Then we reach to the actual killing – and the eponymous day passed by the murdered individual with the killer and his companions. Kraus has excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what transpired when the victim Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day in the company of her associates, loitering having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her individual preoccupations here. The standout figure is Brittney herself, who comes alive partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman spiraling out of control in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par