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The new book centers on individuals seeking clean slates, struggling to escape drugs or toxic relationships, only to witness hope devolve into conflict. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "fresh start", rendering it deliberately jaded through recurring use. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the text. And yet, Kraus herself seems to be making her own fresh start, as this seems a novel form of writing – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. However it turns out to be packed with the familiar conflicts and styles as past novels.

From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book

Chris Kraus was originally an visual artist who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting personal female narrative from humiliation into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the following three engaging and challenging novels missed the power and directness that the epistolary style imparted to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a nonconformist creator who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It follows that she now wants to try out new kinds of material, looking outwards to external narratives, at a time when she asserts that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature redundant.

Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning multiple eras – all unable to escape their histories. The book includes the story of characters Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, transitioning from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one troubled youth by another in a town long abandoned by progressive politics only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in a remote part of Minnesota.

As a reader attracted to polished prose of the kind Kraus often avoids, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the opening part.

Being a reader drawn to crafted language of the style that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was won over by the novelistic voice of the opening segment. There is a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for trivial aspects, like the bucket that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her adored dad. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he answers, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". The author narrates the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."

Frustration and Disruption

I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this new voice could continue through the novel. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the pleasure audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels returns in the middle section. The protagonist is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between two different states, unsuccessful in assisting her husband curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as her spouse moves between low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a environment driven by the hostility and dread that drives a political win. A significant portion discusses about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. In a moment she states that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".

The Homicide Account

Thus we arrive to the actual killing – and the titular day spent by the victim with the murderer and his friends. Kraus has compelling foundational content, and knows hour by hour what occurred as Brandon came to visit Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He sought a sexual encounter but seems affably to have spent the day with her companions, loitering having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being murdered by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.

Fascination and Incompletion

The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to go further into her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who comes alive partly through Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in jail, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the extent that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par