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This latest work is populated with protagonists chasing after clean slates, struggling to escape drugs or harmful partnerships, only to see hope turn into violence. The author often employs the phrase "new beginning", making it deliberately jaded through recurring use. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the text. And yet, she is embarking on her individual reinvention, because this seems a novel form of writing – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. But then it reveals itself to be packed with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as past novels.

From Accidental Writer to Iconic Work

Chris Kraus began as an artist who transitioned to writing unintentionally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, transforming intimate women's literature from self-debasement into assassination. She continued writing, but the following three fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style infused into the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her role as a maverick maker who had evolved into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on real estate deals. It is logical that she currently desires to explore fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a period in which she asserts that current political era makes confessional writing redundant.

Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering three generations – all unable to escape their pasts. There is the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, relocating from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the character of Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband a man named Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a town long abandoned by liberal ideals only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.

For this reader drawn to polished prose of the sort Kraus often avoids, I was seduced by the literary tone of the first section.

As someone who reads who favors crafted language of the style that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was won over by the literary tone of the initial part. It possesses a novel degree of detail that accommodates small details, like the pail that the young Catt dislodges from ice at the start of the story, helped by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a nice toy", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". She tells Emma's story with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not hers, exactly."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this new voice could persist to the end. The author states here that she is annoyed by the pleasure readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the unpolished style she shares with her hero Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books returns in the central part. Catt Greene is working on refurbishing three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between two different states, unsuccessful in assisting Paul manage his alcohol use. She is overwhelmed as Paul moves between poorly supported positions as an addiction therapist in a society driven by the anger and fear that underpins Trump's victory. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. In a moment she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would fail to comprehend, would not even see".

The Homicide Account

So then we come to the homicide in question – and the titular day passed by the deceased with the perpetrator and his companions. The author possesses great source material, and knows hour by hour what transpired when Brandon came to see Brittney after meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, mooching around fixing his automobile and funding treats and narcotics, before being murdered by Brittney's partner Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

Catt develops an obsession by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The standout figure is Brittney, who gains dimension partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing 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