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The Four Spent the Day Together features individuals seeking new beginnings, struggling to escape drugs or toxic relationships, only to witness hope devolve into aggression. Chris Kraus often employs the phrase "new beginning", making it intentionally weary through recurring use. Examples include "He aimed to start over" and "They chose to begin anew" are scattered across the story. At the same time, Kraus herself appears to be undertaking her personal new beginning, as this seems a different type of work – fact-based, truly literary. Yet it reveals itself to be packed with the recurring issues and aesthetics as past novels.

From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book

Kraus was originally an creative who transitioned to writing almost accidentally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of missives to a distant beloved, elevating personal female narrative from abjection into defiance. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels did not possess the impact and rawness that the epistolary style infused into the narrative voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her identity as a renegade artist who had turned into a extensive real estate holder, so there was much discussion on housing investments. It makes sense that she currently desires to experiment with new kinds of material, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a time when she claims that contemporary political climate renders personal narrative obsolete.

Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning multiple eras – each trapped by their backgrounds. The book includes the narrative about Emma and Jasper, based on her own mother and father, transitioning from the urban environment to a pastoral setting. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the persona of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the late recognition of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse her husband Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one lost young man by another in a locality largely deserted by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from Catt's cottage in the Minnesota countryside.

As a reader attracted to polished prose of the kind Kraus herself often avoids, I was enchanted by the narrative style of the opening part.

Being a reader drawn to precise prose of the kind that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the literary tone of the first section. There is a new quality of attentiveness that makes room for small details, like the pail that the youthful Catt pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her cherished parent. "Look, an ice toy!" she says; "a nice toy", he answers, "the ambiguous meanings of language tumbling in their mouths like hard candy". Kraus writes Emma's narrative with inquiry and familiarity. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was bound to become frustrated when I expected this new voice could continue through the novel. The author states here that she dislikes the enjoyment those who appreciate polished prose have derived from I Love Dick; she's dedicated to disjunction, to the untidy aesthetics she echoes from her idol Kathy Acker, and the blankness and repetitiveness of her previous novels reasserts itself in the second segment. Catt is trying to renovate three dozen dilapidated units in the city's most challenging districts while traveling between two different states, unsuccessful in assisting her husband manage his alcohol use. She feels helpless as Paul moves between underfunded jobs as an substance abuse counselor in a world fueled by the anger and fear that underpins a political win. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her professional designation altered from "author" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to care a little too much about this. In a moment she says that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an the United States that her online critics would be unable to grasp, would not even see".

The Killing Story

Thus we arrive to the murder itself – and the titular day experienced by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his associates. Kraus has excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what transpired when a man named Brandon came to meet Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she marketed explicit images. He sought a sexual encounter but appears congenially to have passed the day with her companions, wandering about fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being shot by her romantic interest a man named Micah – a youth with psychological issues who has frequently been hospitalised for aggressive outbursts.

Fascination and Incompletion

Catt gets obsessed by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and daring boundary-pushing wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to go further into her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is Brittney herself, who comes alive partly through Catt seeing herself in her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual spiraling out of control in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that Catt converses with Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. This entire part feels oddly unfinished, to the point that Kraus's narration ends almost mid-par