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This latest work is populated with individuals pursuing clean slates, struggling to escape addictions or harmful partnerships, only to witness hope devolve into conflict. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", making it deliberately jaded through recurring use. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They chose to begin anew" recur in the story. At the same time, Kraus herself appears to be undertaking her own fresh start, since this seems a new kind of book – documentarian, truly literary. But then it reveals itself to be laden with the same dilemmas and aesthetics as her previous works.

From Chance Novelist to Iconic Work

Chris Kraus was originally an artist who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, which was composed of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating personal female narrative from humiliation into rebellion. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the shock and immediacy that the letter form brought to the voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her role as a nonconformist creator who had become a major property owner, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It follows that she presently aims to try out fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to external narratives, at a period in which she asserts that Trumpian politics makes confessional writing obsolete.

Several Eras, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering several time periods – none able to break free from their histories. We encounter the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, versions of Kraus's parents, relocating from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. Additionally the account of Kraus, in the guise of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a town mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.

For this reader fond of polished prose of the sort the author herself tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the first section.

As a reader who appreciates honed writing of the variety that Kraus herself usually avoids, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the first section. There is a novel degree of detail that accommodates minutiae, like the container that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the opening of the book, helped by her adored dad. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like piece candy". She tells Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was bound to become frustrated when I wished this different style could continue through the novel. Kraus notes here that she resents the satisfaction readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she has in common with her idol Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her earlier works comes back in the middle section. The protagonist is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between two different states, failing to help Paul manage his alcohol use. She feels helpless as her spouse moves between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a world fueled by the hostility and dread that underpins Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her listed profession modified from "author" to "landlord" on the online encyclopedia. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. On one occasion she says that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her social media opponents would not understand, would not even see".

The Murder Narrative

Then we reach to the actual killing – and the eponymous day passed by the deceased with the perpetrator and his associates. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what happened when the victim Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He sought a sexual encounter but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, mooching around getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by Brittney's partner Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for aggressive outbursts.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to delve deeper into her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt seeing herself in her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par