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The new book centers on individuals chasing after fresh starts, attempting to leave behind drugs or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into conflict. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", making it intentionally weary through its repetitions. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the text. Meanwhile, the author herself appears to be undertaking her own fresh start, as this seems a novel form of writing – fact-based, authentically narrative. However it reveals itself to be filled with the same dilemmas and approaches as past novels.

From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic

Chris Kraus was originally an creative who transitioned to writing unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming personal female narrative from self-debasement into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the power and directness that the epistolary style infused into the voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a renegade artist who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It makes sense that she now wants to explore new kinds of material, turning outward to other people's stories, at a moment when she states that current political era turns intimate literature redundant.

Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing three generations – none able to break free from their backgrounds. The book includes the tale of Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, relocating from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. There is the account of Kraus, in the persona of Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one troubled youth by another in a locality largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.

As a reader fond of honed writing of the sort the author herself often avoids, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the initial segment.

Being a reader who favors precise prose of the kind that Kraus usually avoids, I was won over by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. It possesses a fresh level of observation that allows space for minutiae, like the container that the young Catt dislodges from ice at the start of the story, helped by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a nice toy", he answers, "the nuanced interpretations of terms rolling around in their mouths like sweet treats". The author narrates 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 bound to become frustrated when I hoped this fresh tone could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she resents the satisfaction audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she echoes from her hero author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her past books comes back in the second segment. The protagonist is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between two different states, failing to help Paul manage his alcohol use. She is overwhelmed as Paul cycles through poorly supported positions as an addiction therapist in a world propelled by the hostility and dread that powers an electoral success. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on social media, her listed profession modified from "writer" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she states that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she may grasp something about an America that her social media opponents would be unable to grasp, would not even see".

The Killing Story

So then we come to the actual killing – and the eponymous day passed by the victim with the perpetrator and his associates. Kraus has great source material, and details moment by moment what transpired when the victim Brandon came to meet Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, wandering about fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt develops an obsession by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to delve deeper into her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who gains dimension in part due to Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par