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The Four Spent the Day Together centers on protagonists chasing after new beginnings, attempting to leave behind addictions or harmful partnerships, only to see hope turn into violence. Chris Kraus frequently uses the phrase "new beginning", making it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Examples include "He aimed to start over" and "They chose to begin anew" recur in the text. Meanwhile, the author herself is embarking on her personal new beginning, since this seems a different type of work – observational, authentically narrative. Yet it proves to be packed with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as earlier books.

From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic

The writer started out as an artist who transitioned to writing unintentionally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of epistles to an unresponsive love interest, converting confessional female writing from humiliation into defiance. She continued writing, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels did not possess the impact and rawness that the letter form infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a renegade artist who had turned into a major property owner, so there was significant attention on housing investments. It follows that she currently desires to explore different types of content, looking outwards to external narratives, at a time when she states that contemporary political climate makes confessional writing unnecessary.

Several Eras, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering three generations – none able to break free from their backgrounds. The book includes the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, relocating from the New York borough to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her partner struggling with addiction a man named Paul. Finally the story of the murder of one directionless individual by another in a community mostly forsaken by liberal ideals only a brief drive from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.

As a reader drawn to honed writing of the kind Kraus herself often avoids, I was seduced by the literary tone of the first section.

As a reader who appreciates precise prose of the kind that Kraus herself often disregards, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. It possesses a novel degree of detail that accommodates trivial aspects, like the container that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she says; "a great plaything", he replies, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like piece candy". The author narrates Emma's narrative with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this fresh tone could persist to the end. The author states here that she resents the enjoyment readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she echoes from her inspiration author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her earlier works reasserts itself in the central part. Catt is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while traveling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help her husband curb his addiction. She is overwhelmed as Paul cycles through low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a world propelled by the anger and fear that powers a political win. A significant portion discusses about Catt being cancelled on social media, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. At one point she states that she's looking into the killing so that before leaving Minnesota, "she might be able to learn something about an the nation that her social media opponents would be unable to grasp, would overlook entirely".

The Murder Narrative

Then we reach to the murder itself – and the referenced day passed by the victim with the killer and his friends. The author possesses excellent raw material, and reconstructs step by step what occurred as Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, mooching around having his vehicle repaired and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing clash in this segment. However, I would have preferred her to explore more thoroughly her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who becomes vivid partially because of the protagonist's connection to her – another bright, bullied girl going off the rails in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par