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The new book is populated with individuals chasing after clean slates, trying to break free from addictions or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into violence. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", transforming it into deliberately jaded through recurring use. Phrases such as "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the story. And yet, Kraus herself seems to be making her personal new beginning, as this presents as a novel form of writing – fact-based, truly literary. However it proves to be laden with the same dilemmas and approaches as her previous works.

From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic

Chris Kraus began as an artist who entered the literary world unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, converting confessional female writing from abjection into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the following three engaging and challenging novels lacked the impact and rawness that the letter form imparted to the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a nonconformist creator who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It is logical that she currently desires to explore fresh narrative sources, directing her gaze to the experiences of others, at a time when she claims that Trumpian politics renders personal narrative obsolete.

Multiple Generations, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering three generations – none able to break free from their pasts. There is the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, moving from the New York borough to a pastoral setting. There is the narrative of the author, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a community long abandoned by progressive politics only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.

As a reader drawn to honed writing of the sort the author herself often avoids, I was seduced by the literary tone of the initial segment.

Being a reader who appreciates precise prose of the style that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the initial part. It possesses a fresh level of observation that allows space for minutiae, like the container that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the opening of the book, aided by her cherished parent. "I found an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a great plaything", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words rolling around in their mouths like sweet treats". The author narrates Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not entirely her own."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this different style could persist to the end. The author states here that she resents the enjoyment audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disruption, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her idol author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works comes back in the central part. The protagonist is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unsuccessful in assisting Paul curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a environment propelled by the anger and fear that underpins an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her occupation changed from "author" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she remarks that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even perceive".

The Killing Story

Thus we arrive to the homicide in question – and the titular day experienced by the deceased with the murderer and his associates. Kraus utilizes excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what occurred as Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, loitering getting his car mended and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.

Fascination and Incompletion

The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I found myself captivated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partly through the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par