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The Four Spent the Day Together features characters pursuing new beginnings, trying to break free from substance abuse or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into violence. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "new beginning", making it intentionally weary through its repetitions. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the text. And yet, she is embarking on her individual reinvention, since this presents as a novel form of writing – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. Yet it proves to be filled with the recurring issues and approaches as earlier books.

From Accidental Writer to Iconic Work

The writer began as an visual artist who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, converting personal female narrative from humiliation into assassination. She continued writing, but the following three engaging and challenging novels missed the power and directness that the letter form brought to the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a renegade artist who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It makes sense that she now wants to experiment with new kinds of material, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a time when she claims that Trumpian politics renders personal narrative obsolete.

Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, covering several time periods – each trapped by their pasts. There is the tale of Emma and Jasper, versions of the author's parents, transitioning from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the guise of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a community largely deserted by progressive politics only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.

As a reader fond of refined literature of the sort Kraus herself typically rejects, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.

As a reader drawn to precise prose of the style that Kraus herself often disregards, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. It possesses a novel degree of detail that accommodates minutiae, like the container that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the opening of the book, assisted by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the nuanced interpretations of terms tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this different style could last out the book. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the pleasure audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books comes back in the middle section. Catt is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between two different states, unable to aid Paul curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a environment driven by the hostility and dread that drives a political win. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on a platform, her occupation changed from "author" to "property owner" on a reference site. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. On one occasion she says that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn something about an America that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".

The Killing Story

So then we come to the actual killing – and the titular day passed by the deceased with the murderer and his associates. Kraus has compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what happened when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day in the company of her associates, mooching around fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.

Fascination and Incompletion

The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who comes alive partly through Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that Catt speaks to Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the point that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par