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The new book is populated with individuals chasing after fresh starts, trying to break free from addictions or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", rendering it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the story. At the same time, Kraus herself is embarking on her own fresh start, since this seems a new kind of book – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. But then it turns out to be filled with the familiar conflicts and styles as earlier books.

From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic

Kraus started out as an artist who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, elevating personal female narrative from self-debasement into assassination. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style imparted to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a maverick maker who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on real estate deals. It follows that she presently aims to experiment with fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a moment when she asserts that current political era renders personal narrative obsolete.

Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, spanning three generations – each trapped by their pasts. We encounter the narrative about Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, transitioning from the New York borough to rural Connecticut. Then there is the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. Finally the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a locality long abandoned by liberal ideals only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader attracted to polished prose of the sort the author herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the literary tone of the initial segment.

As someone who reads who appreciates precise prose of the style that the author tends to eschew, I was captivated by the storytelling approach of the initial part. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for trivial aspects, like the container that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the opening of the book, helped by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she exclaims; "a nice toy", he answers, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". Kraus writes Emma's story with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this different style could continue through the novel. Kraus says here that she dislikes the pleasure readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she has in common with her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books returns in the central part. Catt Greene is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help her husband curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as Paul transitions between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a environment propelled by the rage and anxiety that underpins Trump's victory. A significant portion discusses about Catt being cancelled on social media, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "property owner" on a reference site. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. In a moment she remarks that she's investigating the murder so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her online critics would not understand, would not even see".

The Homicide Account

So then we come to the homicide in question – and the referenced day passed by the victim with the perpetrator and his friends. Kraus has great source material, and details moment by moment what happened when Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day in the company of her associates, mooching around fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being shot by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the point that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par