Book review: The unnamed, 45-year-old narrator of Miranda July’s second novel is, in her own words, “a bit of a public figure”. Without going into “tedious specifics”, she asks us to “picture a woman who had success in several mediums at a young age and has continued very steadily”. Working on her never-explained projects in a converted garage, she lives with her husband Harris and their son Sam, always referred to as they/them.
Having decided, uncharacteristically, to drive rather than fly from Los Angeles to New York, she gets only as far as Monrovia, about 30 minutes away, where she meets, and becomes obsessed by, Davey, a much younger married man who works for Hertz. Rather than continuing her journey, she stays in Monrovia for the entire time, extravagantly redecorating her anodyne motel room and indulging in a startling range of inventive sexual intimacy with Davey, though they scrupulously avoid actual intercourse, since this would amount to betrayal of his wife, Claire. What follows is a wild, absurd and moving consideration of how a woman in her 40s wrangles her sexual and romantic identity alongside home life and work and societal expectations.
This is not a novel for the faint-hearted or the easily embarrassed. Think Sex Education on acid – bawdy and frank are adjectives that come to mind. As in her debut novel, The First Bad Man, July is fearless in her choice of subject matter and in her approach to it. A brilliant and completely original writer, she bends language to her will without apparent effort but with impressive results. Her powers of observation are forensic, her nailing of emotion pinpoint accurate.
Quoting seems invidious, but to give a taste: “I had not participated in the infuriating pleasure of wanting a real and specific body on Earth” or “When she sympathised with his guilt I felt like a wild animal among humans, missing the qualities that make a thing civil”. July is also wickedly and laugh-out-loud funny, with a fine sense of comic timing.
Her debut also traversed the unexpected in an unexpected way, but although it was strangely memorable, July was perhaps a little too in love with tricks and outrageousness. All Fours, just as confronting and unafraid, is more nuanced; the author has better control and less need, perhaps, to show off.
This is a self-regarding, self-concerned book, a book of its time. In a very 2024 way, the reader is unceasingly inside the narrator’s world, privy to her every thought and desire and mood. There is also a good deal of sharing with her closest female friends and a therapist. Reactions to and patience for all this will vary with the age and experience of readers. July, of course, mitigates the navel-gazing with a healthy helping of irony, but gauging where this begins and ends can be puzzling – but then maybe that’s the idea.
July, always honest, offers a realistic view of a marriage that is not wildly passionate and even possesses a strange formality – “like two diplomats who aren’t sure if the other one has poisoned their drink” – but is also built on a “mutual and steadfast devotion so tender I could have cried”. And the child, Sam, manages to be both delightful and credibly imperfect.
This extraordinary book won’t be for everyone but, as fellow writer George Saunders has observed, July is a significant literary talent with a unique voice. If you’re prepared for a fizzing upending of convention and some striking takes on the human condition, take a risk and read All Fours.
All Fours by Miranda July (Canongate, $36.99) is out now.
