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This latest work features protagonists seeking clean slates, struggling to escape drugs or toxic relationships, only to witness hope devolve into conflict. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", making it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Examples include "He aimed to start over" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the text. And yet, the author herself appears to be undertaking her own fresh start, as this seems a different type of work – documentarian, truly literary. Yet it turns out to be laden with the recurring issues and approaches as past novels.

From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic

Chris Kraus started out as an visual artist who entered the literary world somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating personal female narrative from humiliation into defiance. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the shock and immediacy that the letter form infused into the voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a nonconformist creator who had evolved into a extensive real estate holder, so there was significant attention on housing investments. It makes sense that she now wants to explore different types of content, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a moment when she asserts that current political era makes confessional writing obsolete.

Several Eras, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering three generations – each trapped by their histories. There is the tale of characters Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, moving from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a town mostly forsaken by progressive politics only 80 miles from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.

As a reader attracted to refined literature of the sort Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the narrative style of the initial segment.

As a reader drawn to honed writing of the kind that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the first section. It possesses a novel degree of detail that makes room for small details, like the pail that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, assisted by her beloved father. "Look, an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a nice toy", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like hard candy". Kraus writes Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this fresh tone could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the pleasure readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she has in common with her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books comes back in the middle section. Catt Greene is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while shuttling between two different states, failing to help Paul manage his alcohol use. She is overwhelmed as her spouse cycles through poorly supported positions as an addiction therapist in a environment driven by the rage and anxiety that drives Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about the protagonist facing cancellation on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "author" to "property owner" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an America that her social media opponents would not understand, would not even see".

The Murder Narrative

Thus we arrive to the homicide in question – and the referenced day passed by the deceased with the killer and his associates. Kraus has excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day with her companions, mooching around fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by Brittney's partner Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for aggressive outbursts.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The standout figure is Brittney, who comes alive partially because of the protagonist's connection to her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. The author informs us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The complete segment feels oddly unfinished, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par