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The new book features characters chasing after clean slates, attempting to leave behind drugs or harmful partnerships, only to see hope turn into violence. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", rendering it willfully cynical through its repetitions. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the narrative. Meanwhile, Kraus herself is embarking on her personal new beginning, because this appears a new kind of book – observational, truly literary. Yet it proves to be filled with the familiar conflicts and approaches as earlier books.

From Accidental Writer to Cult Classic

Kraus started out as an creative who entered the literary world somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, converting confessional female writing from abjection into assassination. She persisted as a writer, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the impact and rawness that the letter form infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her position as a renegade artist who had turned into a major property owner, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It makes sense that she currently desires to try out different types of content, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a time when she claims that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature redundant.

Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning several time periods – each trapped by their pasts. We encounter the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, moving from the Bronx to a pastoral setting. There is the narrative of the author, in the character of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, 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 locality largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.

As a reader fond of polished prose of the type the author herself tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the opening part.

Being a reader who appreciates honed writing of the style that Kraus often disregards, I was won over by the storytelling approach of the first section. It possesses a fresh level of observation that makes room for trivial aspects, 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 exclaims; "a lovely toy", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words rolling around in their mouths like hard candy". She tells the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was fated to feel let down when I wished this different style could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the pleasure readers like me have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels reasserts itself in the central part. Catt is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while moving between two different states, failing to help Paul manage his alcohol use. She experiences powerlessness as her spouse moves between poorly supported positions as an substance abuse counselor in a society fueled by the hostility and dread that powers Trump's victory. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on a platform, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "real estate holder" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she says that she's researching the homicide so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would overlook entirely".

The Murder Narrative

So then we come to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day passed by the victim with the perpetrator and his companions. Kraus utilizes great source material, and reconstructs step by step what occurred as a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He was hoping for sex but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, loitering getting his car mended and covering the cost of food and substances, before being killed by gunfire by her romantic interest Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for fits of anger.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards accurate chronicling and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The standout figure is the character Brittney, who comes alive partly through Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman derailing in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that Catt converses with Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels strangely incomplete, to the point that her narrative ends almost mid-par