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This latest work is populated with individuals pursuing clean slates, struggling to escape addictions or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into conflict. Chris Kraus frequently uses the phrase "clean slate", rendering it deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Examples include "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the story. And yet, she is embarking on her personal new beginning, because this seems a new kind of book – observational, truly literary. However it proves to be filled with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as earlier books.

From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic

Chris Kraus started out as an artist who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating personal female narrative from abjection into assassination. She kept producing books, but the following three engaging and challenging novels missed the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her role as a renegade artist who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It follows that she currently desires to experiment with fresh narrative sources, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a time when she states that current political era turns intimate literature unnecessary.

Three Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering several time periods – all unable to escape their backgrounds. The book includes the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, moving from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. Then there is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of Catt Greene, confronting the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction a man named Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a locality long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only 80 miles from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.

For this reader attracted to honed writing of the sort Kraus typically rejects, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.

As someone who reads drawn to honed writing of the variety that the author often disregards, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the initial part. It exhibits a novel degree of detail that accommodates minutiae, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, aided by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a great plaything", he answers, "the elliptical meanings of words rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". She tells Emma's narrative with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was fated to feel let down when I wished this different style could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she dislikes the enjoyment readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she echoes from her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels reasserts itself in the central part. Catt Greene is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while moving between Minnesota and LA, unable to aid Paul curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul cycles through underfunded jobs as an substance abuse counselor in a society driven by the anger and fear that powers an electoral success. A significant portion discusses about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "property owner" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she remarks that she's researching the homicide so that before leaving Minnesota, "she might be able to learn something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would not even see".

The Murder Narrative

Then we reach to the actual killing – and the eponymous day experienced by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his associates. The author possesses great source material, and details moment by moment what happened when a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day in the company of her associates, 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.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

The protagonist becomes fixated by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who comes alive partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman spiraling out of control in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par