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The new book features protagonists pursuing clean slates, struggling to escape substance abuse or toxic relationships, only to see hope turn into conflict. Chris Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "new beginning", making it deliberately jaded through constant reiteration. Examples include "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" are scattered across the text. At the same time, the author herself seems to be making her individual reinvention, since this appears a different type of work – documentarian, authentically narrative. However it proves to be packed with the same dilemmas and approaches as her previous works.

From Chance Novelist to Cult Classic

The writer started out as an artist who entered the literary world almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, structured as letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating confessional female writing from abjection into defiance. She continued writing, but the three subsequent engaging and challenging novels lacked the impact and rawness that the epistolary style imparted to the voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her identity as a renegade artist who had turned into a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on housing investments. It makes sense that she now wants to explore different types of content, looking outwards to the experiences of others, at a time when she asserts that contemporary political climate turns intimate literature unnecessary.

Several Eras, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is organized into a trio of segments, encompassing three generations – none able to break free from their backgrounds. There is the narrative about characters Emma and Jasper, versions of the author's parents, relocating from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the persona of Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her partner struggling with addiction a man named Paul. And there is the story of the murder of one lost young man by another in a town mostly forsaken by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's rural residence in a remote part of Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader fond of honed writing of the sort the author herself typically rejects, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the initial segment.

As someone who reads who appreciates crafted language of the kind that Kraus usually avoids, I was seduced by the literary tone of the first section. It exhibits a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for minutiae, like the pail that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a lovely toy", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like hard candy". Kraus writes Emma's story with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not entirely her own."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was fated to feel let down when I expected this different style could continue through the novel. Kraus notes here that she is annoyed by the pleasure readers like me have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she shares with her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her previous novels returns in the middle section. The protagonist is working on refurbishing 36 run-down apartments in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between two different states, failing to help Paul curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as Paul moves between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a society driven by the anger and fear that underpins a political win. There are several pages about Catt being cancelled on social media, her professional designation altered from "author" to "property owner" on a reference site. She still gives the impression to be overly concerned about this. At one point 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 Twitter detractors would fail to comprehend, would not even see".

The Homicide Account

So then we come to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day spent by the deceased with the perpetrator and his companions. Kraus utilizes great source material, and knows hour by hour what occurred as a man named Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He sought a sexual encounter but appears congenially to have passed the day alongside her friends, loitering having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being shot by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt develops an obsession by the narrative, and I was intrigued by the way that her twin drives towards accurate chronicling and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her individual preoccupations here. The standout figure is Brittney, who becomes vivid partially because of the protagonist's connection to her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that Catt converses with Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par