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This latest work is populated with characters chasing after fresh starts, attempting to leave behind drugs or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the narrative. At the same time, the author herself seems to be making her own fresh start, because this appears a different type of work – observational, truly literary. However it reveals itself to be laden with the recurring issues and styles as past novels.

From Unplanned Author to Iconic Work

The writer began as an artist who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating intimate women's literature from humiliation into defiance. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels missed the shock and immediacy that the letter form imparted to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a maverick maker who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was significant attention on housing investments. It follows that she now wants to try out different types of content, looking outwards to external narratives, at a period in which she asserts that current political era turns intimate literature redundant.

Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, encompassing several time periods – all unable to escape their backgrounds. We encounter the story of Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, moving from the New York borough to a pastoral setting. There is the account of Kraus, in the guise of Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. The third thread involves the account of a killing of one troubled youth by another in a community 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 type the author herself typically rejects, I was enchanted by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.

As someone who reads drawn to crafted language of the style that Kraus often disregards, I was captivated by the novelistic voice of the initial part. It possesses a fresh level of observation that accommodates minutiae, like the bucket that the protagonist as a child pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her beloved father. "I found an ice toy!" she says; "a great plaything", he answers, "the elliptical meanings of words rolling around in their mouths like sweet treats". The author narrates Emma's story with inquiry and familiarity. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."

Frustration and Disruption

I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this fresh tone could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she dislikes the satisfaction readers like me have derived from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her inspiration Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books returns in the second segment. The protagonist is attempting to do up 36 run-down apartments in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid Paul manage his alcohol use. She feels helpless as Paul moves between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a environment propelled by the anger and fear that underpins a political win. There are several pages about the protagonist facing cancellation on a platform, her professional designation altered from "author" to "real estate holder" on the online encyclopedia. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. In a moment she states that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an the United States that her Twitter detractors would not understand, would overlook entirely".

The Killing Story

So then we come to the homicide in question – and the referenced day passed by the victim with the killer and his associates. The author possesses great source material, and details moment by moment what occurred as Brandon came to see Brittney after connecting via an application where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, wandering about getting his car mended and funding treats and narcotics, before being shot by Brittney's partner Micah – a individual with mental health challenges who has repeatedly received inpatient care for aggressive outbursts.

Obsession and Unfinished Business

Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to delve deeper into her individual preoccupations here. The standout figure is Brittney, who comes alive partially because of the protagonist's connection to her – another bright, bullied girl derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus tells us that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the point that her narrative ends almost mid-par