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The Four Spent the Day Together centers on individuals pursuing new beginnings, struggling to escape drugs or toxic relationships, only to see hope turn into violence. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "new beginning", making it deliberately jaded through recurring use. Sentences like "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the text. And yet, Kraus herself is embarking on her individual reinvention, since this presents as a novel form of writing – fact-based, authentically narrative. However it reveals itself to be laden with the same dilemmas and approaches as past novels.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

Kraus was originally an artist 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 intimate women's literature from self-debasement into assassination. She continued writing, but the next trio of engaging and challenging novels missed the power and directness that the correspondence format infused into the tone of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her role as a renegade artist who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was much discussion on property transactions. It follows that she now wants to experiment with new kinds of material, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a period in which she states that current political era makes confessional writing redundant.

Multiple Generations, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning several time periods – none able to break free from their pasts. We encounter the story of Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, relocating from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. There is the story of Kraus herself, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, confronting the late recognition of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a town long abandoned by progressive politics only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.

From my perspective as a reader attracted to polished prose of the sort Kraus herself typically rejects, I was captivated by the literary tone of the opening part.

Being a reader who appreciates crafted language of the kind that Kraus often disregards, I was captivated by the storytelling approach of the initial part. There is a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for minutiae, like the bucket that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the start of the story, assisted by her beloved father. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a great plaything", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms circulating in their speech like piece candy". Kraus writes the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not precisely her dream."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was fated to feel let down when I wished this new voice could continue through the novel. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the pleasure audiences such as myself have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the unpolished style she shares with her hero author Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her past books returns in the central part. Catt Greene is working on refurbishing three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between two different states, failing to help Paul control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as her spouse moves between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a world propelled by the hostility and dread that drives an electoral success. A significant portion discusses about Catt being cancelled on social media, her occupation changed from "novelist" to "property owner" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. In a moment she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before exiting the region, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".

The Killing Story

So then we come to the actual killing – and the referenced day spent by the murdered individual with the killer and his companions. Kraus has excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what happened when the victim Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He sought a sexual encounter but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, wandering about fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being shot by her romantic interest Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

Catt gets obsessed by the account, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is Brittney, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman spiraling out of control in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in prison, but she fails to enact these dialogues. The whole section feels strangely incomplete, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par