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The new book is populated with protagonists seeking clean slates, struggling to escape drugs or harmful partnerships, only to see hope turn into conflict. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", making it intentionally weary through constant reiteration. Examples include "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the narrative. And yet, she seems to be making her own fresh start, because this appears a new kind of book – documentarian, authentically narrative. Yet it proves to be filled with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as past novels.

From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book

The writer began as an visual artist who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as epistles to an unresponsive love interest, elevating intimate women's literature from humiliation into defiance. She continued writing, but the following three fascinating and rebarbative novels missed the impact and rawness that the correspondence format infused into the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her position as a renegade artist who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on real estate deals. It makes sense that she presently aims to experiment with new kinds of material, looking outwards to external narratives, at a time when she asserts that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature redundant.

Multiple Generations, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, encompassing three generations – all unable to escape their histories. We encounter the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, relocating from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the character of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a locality largely deserted by liberal ideals only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in rural Minnesota.

For this reader drawn to refined literature of the sort the author herself typically rejects, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the initial segment.

Being a reader who favors precise prose of the style that the author tends to eschew, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. There is a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates small details, like the container that the young Catt frees from the ice at the start of the story, helped by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words rolling around in their mouths like sweet treats". She tells the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this fresh tone could continue through the novel. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the pleasure audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she has in common with her idol author Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books comes back in the second segment. Catt is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid Paul curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as Paul transitions between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a environment propelled by the hostility and dread that drives Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "property owner" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to be overly concerned about this. In a moment she remarks that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she might be able to learn something about an America that her Twitter detractors would fail to comprehend, would not even perceive".

The Killing Story

Then we reach to the actual killing – and the eponymous day experienced by the deceased with the perpetrator and his associates. The author possesses excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what happened when Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He sought a sexual encounter but seems affably to have spent the day with her companions, mooching around getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being shot by Brittney's partner Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has repeatedly received inpatient care for fits of anger.

Fascination and Incompletion

The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I found myself captivated by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. However, I would have preferred her to delve deeper into her individual preoccupations here. The most interesting character is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt's identification with her – another bright, bullied girl spiraling out of control in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par