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The Four Spent the Day Together centers on characters pursuing fresh starts, struggling to escape addictions or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into violence. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into intentionally weary through its repetitions. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" appear throughout the narrative. At the same time, the author herself appears to be undertaking her personal new beginning, because this presents as a new kind of book – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. But then it reveals itself to be laden with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as past novels.

From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book

Chris Kraus was originally an creative who became a writer somewhat by chance with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming personal female narrative from humiliation into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels missed the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style imparted to the voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her position as a maverick maker who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It makes sense that she now wants to explore fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to external narratives, at a time when she states that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature redundant.

Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, spanning several time periods – all unable to escape their histories. There is the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, transitioning from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. There is the account of Kraus, in the character of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction her husband Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one directionless individual by another in a locality long abandoned by progressive politics only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.

From my perspective as a reader fond of polished prose of the type Kraus tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the initial segment.

Being a reader who appreciates crafted language of the style that Kraus usually avoids, I was won over by the novelistic voice of the first section. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for minutiae, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the opening of the book, aided by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". The author narrates Emma's story with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was bound to become frustrated when I hoped this different style could persist to the end. The author states here that she resents the satisfaction audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the unpolished style she echoes from her idol author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works reasserts itself in the middle section. Catt is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while shuttling between two different states, unsuccessful in assisting Paul curb his addiction. She feels helpless as her spouse moves between low-resource employment as an substance abuse counselor in a environment propelled by the hostility and dread that powers an electoral success. A significant portion discusses about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her listed profession modified from "author" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before leaving Minnesota, "she could potentially understand something about an the nation that her social media opponents would fail to comprehend, would overlook entirely".

The Killing Story

Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day experienced by the victim with the perpetrator and his companions. Kraus has excellent raw material, and details moment by moment what happened when the victim Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she sold sex pictures. He sought a sexual encounter but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, loitering fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by Brittney's partner Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to explore more thoroughly her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who comes alive partially because of Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman going off the rails in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par