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This latest work is populated with protagonists seeking clean slates, attempting to leave behind substance abuse or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into violence. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "clean slate", making it deliberately jaded through recurring use. Sentences like "He could make a fresh start" and "They opted for a clean break" appear throughout the narrative. And yet, Kraus herself is embarking on her personal new beginning, as this seems a new kind of book – observational, genuinely novelistic. However it turns out to be filled with the familiar conflicts and approaches as earlier books.

From Unplanned Author to Renowned Book

The writer began as an visual artist who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, made up of missives to a distant beloved, transforming confessional female writing from humiliation into rebellion. She continued writing, but the next trio of fascinating and rebarbative novels lacked the impact and rawness that the letter form brought to the voice of I Love Dick. It didn't help was her role as a renegade artist 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 explore new kinds of material, turning outward to external narratives, at a period in which she asserts that contemporary political climate turns intimate literature redundant.

Several Eras, One Unescapable Past

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing multiple eras – none able to break free from their pasts. There is the story of a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, moving from the urban environment to rural Connecticut. There is the narrative of the author, in the character of protagonist Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one directionless individual by another in a locality long abandoned by liberal ideals only a brief drive from Catt's cottage in a remote part of Minnesota.

For this reader fond of refined literature of the type the author herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the novelistic voice of the first section.

As a reader who appreciates precise prose of the variety that the author usually avoids, I was seduced by the literary tone of the initial part. It exhibits a fresh level of observation that allows space for minutiae, like the pail that the protagonist as a child frees from the ice at the beginning of the narrative, aided by her adored dad. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a great plaything", he responds, "the ambiguous meanings of language circulating in their speech like hard candy". She tells the tale of Emma with interest and closeness. "Emma felt like she'd stepped into a dream – not entirely her own."

Frustration and Disruption

I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this new voice could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she resents the enjoyment audiences such as myself have taken from I Love Dick; she's devoted to disjunction, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her hero author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her earlier works comes back in the middle section. The protagonist is working on refurbishing multiple decrepit residences in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between two different states, failing to help Paul control his drinking. She feels helpless as Paul moves between poorly supported positions as an addiction therapist in a society driven by the anger and fear that underpins Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt's social media ostracism on a platform, her listed profession modified from "author" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. The author still appears to care a little too much about this. On one occasion she remarks that she's looking into the killing so that before leaving Minnesota, "she might be able to learn something about an the nation that her social media opponents would fail to comprehend, would not even perceive".

The Killing Story

So then we come to the murder itself – and the referenced day experienced by the deceased with the perpetrator and his associates. The author possesses great source material, and reconstructs step by step what transpired when the victim Brandon came to visit Brittney after connecting via an application where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but seems affably to have spent the day alongside her friends, loitering fixing his automobile and covering the cost of food and substances, before being murdered by Brittney's partner Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has often been institutionalized for violent rage.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that Kraus's dual urges towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking wrestle in this part. Yet I wished her to go further into her own obsessions here. The most interesting character is Brittney herself, who becomes vivid partially because of Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual going off the rails in a struggling, neglected community. Kraus notes that the protagonist communicates with Brittney in jail, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels oddly unfinished, to the point that the author's storytelling ends almost mid-par