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The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with individuals seeking new beginnings, attempting to leave behind drugs or harmful partnerships, only to witness hope devolve into violence. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", making it deliberately jaded through recurring use. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the narrative. And yet, the author herself appears to be undertaking her own fresh start, since this seems a novel form of writing – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. But then it turns out to be packed with the familiar conflicts and styles as earlier books.

From Chance Novelist to Iconic Work

The writer started out as an creative who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, converting confessional female writing from self-debasement into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels did not possess the power and directness that the epistolary style infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a nonconformist creator who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It follows that she presently aims to experiment with new kinds of material, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a moment when she states that Trumpian politics renders personal narrative redundant.

Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing multiple eras – each trapped by their pasts. We encounter the story of Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, moving from the Bronx to a pastoral setting. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a community largely deserted by liberal ideals only a short distance from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.

From my perspective as a reader drawn to honed writing of the type Kraus often avoids, I was captivated by the literary tone of the initial segment.

Being a reader who favors honed writing of the kind that Kraus tends to eschew, I was won over by the literary tone of the opening segment. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for minutiae, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, aided by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was destined to be disappointed when I wished this different style could last out the book. The author states here that she resents the satisfaction those who appreciate polished prose have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her idol Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels reasserts itself in the middle section. The protagonist is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help Paul manage his alcohol use. She is overwhelmed as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a world propelled by the hostility and dread that drives an electoral success. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her occupation changed from "writer" to "landlord" on a reference site. The author still appears 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 Twitter detractors would fail to comprehend, would overlook entirely".

The Homicide Account

So then we come to the actual killing – and the referenced day spent by the victim with the killer and his associates. The author possesses excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what happened when 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 alongside her friends, mooching around getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par