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The Four Spent the Day Together features individuals seeking new beginnings, attempting to leave behind drugs or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. The author often employs the phrase "new beginning", rendering it willfully cynical through constant reiteration. Phrases such as "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" recur in the story. Meanwhile, she appears to be undertaking her individual reinvention, since this appears a different type of work – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. Yet it turns out to be laden with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as her previous works.

From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work

Chris Kraus was originally an visual artist who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, structured as missives to a distant beloved, transforming confessional female writing from abjection into defiance. She kept producing books, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the impact and rawness that the correspondence format infused into the tone of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a nonconformist creator who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It follows that she now wants to explore new kinds of material, turning outward to external narratives, at a period in which she claims that Trumpian politics renders personal narrative redundant.

Multiple Generations, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering three generations – each trapped by their pasts. We encounter the story of Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, relocating from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. There is the account of Kraus, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, grappling with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one directionless individual by another in a locality mostly forsaken by progressive politics only a short distance from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.

As a reader fond of honed writing of the kind the author herself tends to eschew, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the first section.

Being a reader drawn to honed writing of the kind that Kraus herself often disregards, I was won over by the literary tone of the initial part. There is a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for minutiae, like the bucket that the young Catt frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she exclaims; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like sweet treats". The author narrates Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not entirely her own."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this new voice could continue through the novel. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment those who appreciate polished prose have taken from I Love Dick; she's committed to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she has in common with her idol author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her earlier works comes back in the second segment. Catt Greene is attempting to do up multiple decrepit residences in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between two different states, unable to aid Paul control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as Paul transitions between underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a world driven by the rage and anxiety that powers a political win. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her listed profession modified from "novelist" to "real estate holder" on a reference site. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. On one occasion she states that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "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 Homicide Account

Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the referenced day spent by the victim with the killer and his friends. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what happened when the victim Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He was hoping for sex but seems affably to have spent the day in the company of her associates, mooching around getting his car mended and funding treats and narcotics, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

The protagonist becomes fixated by the account, and I found myself captivated by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and daring boundary-pushing clash in this segment. Yet I wished her to go further into her own obsessions here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels oddly unfinished, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par