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The Four Spent the Day Together is populated with characters pursuing fresh starts, struggling to escape drugs or abusive marriages, only to witness hope devolve into violence. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "fresh start", making it intentionally weary through its repetitions. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the narrative. At the same time, Kraus herself is embarking on her personal new beginning, as this appears a novel form of writing – fact-based, genuinely novelistic. However it reveals itself to be filled with the familiar conflicts and approaches as past novels.

From Unplanned Author to Cult Classic

The writer was originally an creative who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 cult classic I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, elevating confessional female writing from humiliation into defiance. She continued writing, but the three subsequent fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the power and directness that the correspondence format brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her position as a nonconformist creator who had evolved into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It makes sense that she presently aims to experiment with fresh narrative sources, turning outward to external narratives, at a period in which she asserts that Trumpian politics renders personal narrative obsolete.

Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, covering multiple eras – all unable to escape their backgrounds. We encounter the story of Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, transitioning from the Bronx to the Connecticut countryside. There is the narrative of the author, in the persona of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the emergence of Trump, and her partner struggling with addiction her husband Paul. Finally the story of the murder of one directionless individual by another in a town mostly forsaken by progressive politics only a brief drive from Catt's rural residence in rural Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader attracted to refined literature of the kind the author herself often avoids, I was captivated by the narrative style of the first section.

As a reader who favors precise prose of the style that Kraus often disregards, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the initial part. There is a novel degree of detail that accommodates minutiae, like the bucket that the youthful Catt dislodges from ice at the opening of the book, aided by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a nice toy", he answers, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like hard candy". The author narrates Emma's narrative with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was fated to feel let down when I expected this different style could persist to the end. Kraus says here that she resents the enjoyment readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her hero Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her past books comes back in the central part. Catt Greene is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while traveling between the Midwest and the West Coast, failing to help her husband curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as her spouse transitions between poorly supported positions as an recovery specialist in a society fueled by the rage and anxiety that drives an electoral success. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on social media, her professional designation altered from "novelist" to "landlord" on a reference site. Kraus still seems to invest excessive emotion about this. In a moment she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before exiting the region, "she could potentially understand something about an the United States that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would not even perceive".

The Killing Story

Then we reach to the murder itself – and the eponymous day spent by the deceased with the perpetrator and his associates. Kraus utilizes compelling foundational content, and reconstructs step by step what occurred as the victim Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, wandering about getting his car mended and paying for snacks and drugs, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's boyfriend 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 daring boundary-pushing wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to explore more thoroughly her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partly through Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. This entire part feels oddly unfinished, to the degree that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par