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The Four Spent the Day Together centers on individuals seeking new beginnings, struggling to escape drugs or harmful partnerships, only to see hope turn into conflict. Chris Kraus frequently uses the phrase "new beginning", rendering it deliberately jaded through recurring use. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They chose to begin anew" recur in the narrative. Meanwhile, the author herself appears to be undertaking her personal new beginning, since this presents as a different type of work – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. Yet it turns out to be packed with the familiar conflicts and styles as earlier books.

From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work

Kraus began as an visual artist who transitioned to writing somewhat by chance with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, converting confessional female writing from humiliation into rebellion. She kept producing books, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the correspondence format imparted to the voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her role as a renegade artist who had become a extensive real estate holder, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It is logical that she currently desires to experiment with different types of content, directing her gaze to external narratives, at a period in which she claims that contemporary political climate turns intimate literature obsolete.

Several Eras, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering multiple eras – each trapped by their pasts. There is the story of Emma and Jasper, versions of her own mother and father, moving from the New York borough to a pastoral setting. Then there is the narrative of the author, in the guise of Catt Greene, confronting the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her addict husband Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a locality largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in the Minnesota countryside.

As a reader drawn to polished prose of the sort the author herself typically rejects, I was captivated by the narrative style of the opening part.

Being a reader who favors honed writing of the style that the author usually avoids, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the opening segment. It possesses a fresh level of observation that makes room for trivial aspects, like the container that the young Catt dislodges from ice at the opening of the book, helped by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a nice toy", he answers, "the nuanced interpretations of terms tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". She tells the tale of Emma with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma experienced a dreamlike sensation – not hers, exactly."

Frustration and Disruption

I was fated to feel let down when I expected this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she resents the enjoyment audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the unpolished style she echoes from her inspiration writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels comes back in the central part. Catt is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while shuttling between Minnesota and LA, unable to aid her husband control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul transitions between underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a environment fueled by the anger and fear that powers a political win. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on Twitter, her occupation changed from "author" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. At one point she remarks that she's investigating the murder so that before exiting the region, "she could potentially understand something about an America that her social media opponents would fail to comprehend, would not even see".

The Murder Narrative

Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the referenced day passed by the victim with the murderer and his friends. The author possesses compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what happened when Brandon came to see Brittney after connecting via an application where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy 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 shot by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

Catt gets obsessed by the narrative, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and daring boundary-pushing tussle in this section. However, I would have preferred her to delve deeper into her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partially because of the protagonist's connection to her – another bright, bullied girl spiraling out of control in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus tells us that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the extent that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par