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This latest work features individuals pursuing clean slates, attempting to leave behind addictions or toxic relationships, only to see hope turn into aggression. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", making it deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the story. And yet, Kraus herself seems to be making her personal new beginning, because this presents as a new kind of book – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. Yet it turns out to be packed with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as past novels.

From Accidental Writer to Iconic Work

Chris Kraus began as an creative who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, transforming confessional female writing from humiliation into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of compelling and abrasive novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her role as a maverick maker who had evolved into a extensive real estate holder, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It follows that she currently desires to experiment with fresh narrative sources, turning outward to external narratives, at a time when she claims that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative redundant.

Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning three generations – all unable to escape their backgrounds. There is the story of Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, transitioning from the urban environment to a pastoral setting. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition 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 directionless individual by another in a community long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.

From my perspective as a reader drawn to refined literature of the kind the author herself tends to eschew, I was captivated by the literary tone of the first section.

As a reader drawn to honed writing of the variety that the author often disregards, I was captivated by the literary tone of the opening segment. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates minutiae, like the container that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the opening of the book, aided by her cherished parent. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like sweet treats". She tells Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this new voice could last out the book. The author states here that she resents the satisfaction audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she shares with her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels reasserts itself in the middle section. The protagonist is working on refurbishing three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between two different states, unsuccessful in assisting Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as her spouse cycles through low-resource employment as an recovery specialist in a environment propelled by the anger and fear that drives an electoral success. A significant portion discusses about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. On one occasion she states that she's investigating the murder so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her online critics would not understand, would not even perceive".

The Murder Narrative

So then we come to the homicide in question – and the titular day experienced by the deceased with the perpetrator and his friends. Kraus utilizes compelling foundational content, and knows hour by hour what happened when Brandon came to see Brittney after connecting via an application where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day in the company of her associates, loitering having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards accurate chronicling and reckless transgression tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who comes alive partly through the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that her narrative ends almost mid-par