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The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with individuals pursuing clean slates, trying to break free from substance abuse or toxic relationships, only to witness hope devolve into conflict. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", transforming it into deliberately jaded through recurring use. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the story. Meanwhile, the author herself is embarking on her own fresh start, as this appears a new kind of book – fact-based, authentically narrative. However it proves to be filled with the same dilemmas and approaches as earlier books.

From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic

Kraus began as an creative who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting personal female narrative from abjection into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a maverick maker who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was significant attention on real estate deals. It is logical that she now wants to explore fresh narrative sources, turning outward to other people's stories, at a time when she states that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative unnecessary.

Several Eras, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering several time periods – all unable to escape their backgrounds. There is the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, relocating from the urban environment 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 emergence of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. Finally the story of the murder of one troubled youth by another in a community largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.

As a reader drawn to honed writing of the kind the author herself tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the opening part.

Being a reader who appreciates precise prose of the variety that the author usually avoids, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the first section. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for minutiae, like the bucket that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the opening of the book, helped by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a great plaything", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". She tells the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this different style could continue through the novel. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the pleasure audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her idol author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books reasserts itself in the middle section. Catt Greene is working on refurbishing three dozen dilapidated units in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while moving between Minnesota and LA, unsuccessful in assisting Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul cycles through underfunded jobs as an substance abuse counselor in a world propelled by the hostility and dread that powers an electoral success. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on social media, her occupation changed from "writer" to "real estate holder" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. At one point she says that she's investigating the murder so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn something about an the nation that her online critics would not understand, would overlook entirely".

The Murder Narrative

So then we come to the murder itself – and the titular day passed by the deceased with the perpetrator and his friends. Kraus utilizes compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what occurred as the victim Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt develops an obsession by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who gains dimension partially because of the protagonist's connection to her – another bright, bullied girl spiraling out of control in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par