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This latest work is populated with characters chasing after fresh starts, struggling to escape addictions or toxic relationships, only to see hope turn into aggression. The author frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the text. At the same time, she appears to be undertaking her own fresh start, as this seems a new kind of book – documentarian, truly literary. Yet it proves to be filled with the familiar conflicts and approaches as her previous works.

From Chance Novelist to Iconic Work

Chris Kraus was originally an artist who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, converting intimate women's literature from self-debasement into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the impact and rawness that the letter form brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a maverick maker who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It follows that she now wants to try out fresh narrative sources, turning outward to the experiences of others, at a period in which she claims that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing unnecessary.

Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning multiple eras – each trapped by their pasts. We encounter the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, representations of Kraus's parents, relocating from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the guise of protagonist Catt Greene, confronting the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a community mostly forsaken by liberal ideals only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.

As a reader drawn to honed writing of the kind Kraus often avoids, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the opening part.

As a reader who appreciates honed writing of the style that the author tends to eschew, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that accommodates minutiae, like the container that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the start of the story, aided by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she exclaims; "a lovely toy", he answers, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like piece candy". She tells Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."

Frustration and Disruption

I was fated to feel let down when I expected this different style could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the satisfaction those who appreciate polished prose have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her past books comes back in the central part. Catt Greene is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid her husband manage his alcohol use. She feels helpless as Paul moves between poorly supported positions as an addiction therapist in a environment propelled by the rage and anxiety that underpins a political win. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. In a moment she says that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she could potentially understand something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would fail to comprehend, would overlook entirely".

The Killing Story

Thus we arrive to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day passed by the victim with the murderer and his associates. Kraus has compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what happened when the victim Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, wandering about having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I found myself captivated by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the point that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par