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The Four Spent the Day Together features characters chasing after new beginnings, attempting to leave behind addictions or harmful partnerships, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. The author frequently uses the phrase "new beginning", making it deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They opted for a clean break" recur in the text. At the same time, she is embarking on her own fresh start, as this appears a different type of work – documentarian, genuinely novelistic. However it reveals itself to be packed with the recurring issues and approaches as her previous works.

From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book

Chris Kraus started out as an artist who became a writer unintentionally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, transforming confessional female writing from abjection into rebellion. She persisted as a writer, but the following three fascinating and rebarbative novels did not possess the shock and immediacy that the epistolary style imparted to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her position as a maverick maker who had evolved into a extensive real estate holder, so there was significant attention on property transactions. It makes sense that she currently desires to experiment with new kinds of material, turning outward to other people's stories, at a time when she asserts that Trumpian politics turns intimate literature redundant.

Three Generations, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, covering multiple eras – each trapped by their pasts. There is the story of characters Emma and Jasper, representations of the author's parents, moving from the Bronx to rural Connecticut. There is the account of Kraus, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse Paul. Finally the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a town mostly forsaken by liberal ideals only 80 miles from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.

From my perspective as a reader fond of refined literature of the kind Kraus herself typically rejects, I was enchanted by the literary tone of the initial segment.

As someone who reads who favors crafted language of the style that Kraus herself often disregards, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the first section. It possesses a new quality of attentiveness that accommodates small details, like the container that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the start of the story, helped by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she declares; "a great plaything", he replies, "the elliptical meanings of words circulating in their speech like hard candy". She tells Emma's narrative with curiosity and intimacy. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not precisely her dream."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was destined to be disappointed when I expected this fresh tone could last out the book. Kraus says here that she is annoyed by the enjoyment those who appreciate polished prose have taken from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to fragmentation, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her hero writer Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her past books reasserts itself in the second segment. Catt is trying to renovate 36 run-down apartments in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while moving between Minnesota and LA, unable to aid her husband curb his addiction. She experiences powerlessness as Paul moves between low-resource employment as an addiction therapist in a society fueled by the rage and anxiety that powers Trump's victory. A significant portion discusses about the protagonist facing cancellation on social media, her occupation changed from "novelist" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to be overly concerned about this. On one occasion she remarks that she's researching the homicide so that before departing the state, "she may grasp something about an the nation that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would overlook entirely".

The Murder Narrative

Then we reach to the homicide in question – and the referenced day experienced by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his associates. Kraus utilizes great source material, and reconstructs step by step what occurred as Brandon came to meet Brittney after meeting her on an app where she marketed explicit images. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day in the company of her associates, mooching around having his vehicle repaired and funding treats and narcotics, before being killed by gunfire by Brittney's partner a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt develops an obsession by the account, and I was intrigued by the way that the author's conflicting impulses towards ethical reporting and audacious rule-breaking tussle in this section. Yet I wished her to explore more thoroughly her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partly through Catt seeing herself in her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman derailing in a troubled, forgotten town. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par