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The Four Spent the Day Together features protagonists seeking new beginnings, struggling to escape addictions or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into aggression. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into willfully cynical through its repetitions. Examples include "He aimed to start over" and "They chose to begin anew" appear throughout the story. At the same time, she seems to be making her personal new beginning, because this appears a novel form of writing – documentarian, truly literary. But then it reveals itself to be filled with the recurring issues and aesthetics as past novels.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

Chris Kraus was originally an visual artist who transitioned to writing unintentionally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, transforming personal female narrative from abjection into defiance. She persisted as a writer, but the following three compelling and abrasive novels missed the power and directness that the letter form brought to the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her position as a renegade artist who had turned into a extensive real estate holder, so there was considerable focus on property transactions. It follows that she presently aims to try out new kinds of material, turning outward to other people's stories, at a moment when she states that Trumpian politics renders personal narrative redundant.

Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering three generations – each trapped by their backgrounds. The book includes the story of characters Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, moving from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of protagonist Catt Greene, confronting the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. Finally the narrative of a homicide of one directionless individual by another in a town mostly forsaken by liberal ideals only 80 miles from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.

For this reader fond of polished prose of the type Kraus herself often avoids, I was captivated by the narrative style of the initial segment.

As a reader who favors precise prose of the variety that Kraus herself often disregards, I was won over by the literary tone of the first section. There is a novel degree of detail that makes room for small details, like the container that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the start of the story, helped by her cherished parent. "I found an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a nice toy", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language rolling around in their mouths like hard candy". She tells Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was fated to feel let down when I expected this different style could continue through the novel. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the pleasure readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the unpolished style she echoes from her hero author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works reasserts itself in the middle section. Catt Greene is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in the city's most challenging districts while moving between Minnesota and LA, unsuccessful in assisting Paul manage his alcohol use. She feels helpless as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a environment propelled by the hostility and dread that drives a political win. A significant portion discusses about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her occupation changed from "writer" to "real estate holder" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to care a little too much about this. At one point she says that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she could potentially understand something about an America that her social media opponents would not understand, would not even perceive".

The Killing Story

Then we reach to the murder itself – and the titular day experienced by the deceased with the murderer and his companions. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and knows hour by hour what happened when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, mooching around getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has repeatedly received inpatient care for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to go further into her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who gains dimension partly through the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par