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The Four Spent the Day Together features characters pursuing new beginnings, trying to break free from addictions or abusive marriages, only to see hope turn into aggression. The author often employs the phrase "clean slate", making it deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" appear throughout the story. At the same time, the author herself is embarking on her personal new beginning, since this appears a novel form of writing – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. But then it reveals itself to be laden with the recurring issues and styles as past novels.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

Chris Kraus began as an creative who transitioned to writing unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, transforming personal female narrative from abjection into defiance. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style brought to the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a maverick maker who had evolved into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It makes sense that she now wants to try out new kinds of material, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a moment when she claims that current political era makes confessional writing unnecessary.

Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning several time periods – none able to break free from their pasts. We encounter the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on the author's parents, transitioning from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, confronting the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. Finally the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a community largely deserted by progressive politics only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.

From my perspective as a reader fond of honed writing of the type the author herself typically rejects, I was seduced by the narrative style of the first section.

Being a reader drawn to honed writing of the style that Kraus tends to eschew, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the initial part. There is a fresh level of observation that makes room for small details, like the container that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the opening of the book, helped by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language rolling around in their mouths like piece candy". The author narrates Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "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. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the satisfaction those who appreciate polished prose have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the unpolished style she shares with her hero Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels reasserts itself in the middle section. The protagonist is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between two different states, failing to help Paul control his drinking. She is overwhelmed as Paul cycles through underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a society propelled by the hostility and dread that underpins Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "landlord" on a reference site. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she states that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an the United States 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 killer and his companions. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what happened when the victim Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, wandering about fixing his automobile and funding treats and narcotics, before being shot by Brittney's partner Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has repeatedly received inpatient care for aggressive outbursts.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt develops an obsession by the narrative, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to go further into her personal fixations here. The most interesting character is Brittney, who comes alive in part due to Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in prison, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par