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The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with protagonists pursuing fresh starts, struggling to escape drugs or abusive marriages, only to find hope curdling into conflict. Chris Kraus frequently uses the phrase "new beginning", making it deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They chose to begin anew" appear throughout the text. Meanwhile, she is embarking on her own fresh start, as this seems a new kind of book – fact-based, authentically narrative. Yet it turns out to be laden with the same dilemmas and approaches as earlier books.

From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work

The writer was originally an visual artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, structured as missives to a distant beloved, transforming personal female narrative from abjection into rebellion. She continued writing, but the following three engaging and challenging novels lacked the power and directness that the letter form imparted to the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her identity as a maverick maker who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on housing investments. It follows that she presently aims to try out fresh narrative sources, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a moment when she states that current political era turns intimate literature redundant.

Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, encompassing three generations – each trapped by their backgrounds. The book includes the tale of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, relocating from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. And there is the account of a killing of one lost young man by another in a town largely deserted by progressive politics only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in the Minnesota countryside.

For this reader attracted to polished prose of the sort Kraus herself typically rejects, I was captivated by the narrative style of the first section.

Being a reader who favors precise prose of the kind that Kraus often disregards, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the initial part. There is a fresh level of observation that makes room for small details, like the pail that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the opening of the book, aided by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a great plaything", he answers, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". Kraus writes the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was fated to feel let down when I wished this fresh tone could continue through the novel. The author states here that she resents the enjoyment those who appreciate polished prose have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her idol writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels reasserts itself in the central part. The protagonist is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid her husband control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul moves between poorly supported positions as an addiction therapist in a world driven by the hostility and dread that underpins a political win. A significant portion discusses about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "property owner" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to be overly concerned about this. At one point she says that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she could potentially understand something about an the nation that her Twitter detractors would fail to comprehend, would not even see".

The Homicide Account

Then we reach to the murder itself – and the eponymous day passed by the deceased with the murderer and his friends. Kraus utilizes compelling foundational content, and details moment by moment what happened when 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 with her companions, wandering about getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being shot by Brittney's partner Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for aggressive outbursts.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and daring boundary-pushing clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The standout figure is Brittney, who gains dimension partly through the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels strangely incomplete, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par