Miranda July’s new novel, All Fours, continues her preoccupation with mediation and role play in the service of intimacy, and her challenge to the notion of an authentic or consistent sexual identity is as daring and disruptive as ever. Several things have changed, however, one being a shift in tone away from her first novel, The First Bad Man, which uses a broadly comic character, Cheryl, whose naivety and obliviousness are very effective in disarming squeamishness about sexual explicitness. July doesn’t leave behind comedy entirely in her new novel, but there’s a tamping down of the humour and she often approaches the subject of erotic intimacy without the safeguard of comic license.
Some of July’s early notes for the new novel reveal frustration with her strategies for smuggling in challenging material, and she writes: ‘I’m so tired of the ways I’ve been clever and funny and strange’, aspiring ‘to write straight’ instead. July elaborates on this, saying, ‘I got so used to making a character that is weird enough and unreliable enough that she can say things that are really not O.K., and do things that are really not O.K., and everyone will laugh, but part of them will resonate with it, like, ‘Oh, God, I’m kind of like that’’ (Schwarz). In this light the broad comedy of Cheryl’s eccentricity can be seen to provide a degree of safety and distance, both for the reader and for the writer, who can hold the material at one remove, away from any implication of autobiography. The pursuit of intimacy is July’s great project, and the comic eccentricity of earlier characters could be a form of self-protection, while the greater realism of All Fours‘ narrator as well as her autofictional aspect (a middle aged, moderately famous artist, married with one child, much like July herself) are a more daring enactment of intimacy with the reader.
The First Bad Man traces the evolving relationship between middle-aged, frumpy Cheryl and Clee, a much younger, beautiful woman. Inexperienced, and stolidly oblivious to social nuance, Cheryl’s naivety means she doesn’t recognise the erotic charge of their role playing. When pressed about the exact nature of the pleasure, she replies: ‘A little theatrical but mostly athletic. And I’m the most surprised of anyone because I’ve never been good at sports’ (91). All Fours is also preoccupied with role play and the triangulation of desire, but without Cheryl’s comic obliviousness the erotic experiences feel edgier. The narrator is sexually obsessed with a much younger man, Davey, and unable to consummate the relationship, she lives in a frustrated, ‘agonised dream world’ (183) until she meets a 60 year old woman, Audra, the catalyst for Davey’s sexual awakening years earlier. Audra recognises the toxicity of the narrator’s sexual obsession, and re-lives her own past encounters with Davey as a way of releasing the narrator out of fantasy into reality. The encounter moves from Audra’s re-telling to mutual masturbation and then to sex. As always, July is striving for the new thing, ‘something that didn’t already have a name’ (258), avoiding ‘prefab structures’ (211) or conventional eroticism, and the encounter, which digs deep into the cultural misogyny towards older women, is characteristically unclassifiable. It’s markedly without chemistry or even affection, with Audra’s agenda ‘more self-help than sexual’ (206), more practical assistance than seduction, and the lack of connection between the two is clear in the narrator’s frequent irritation (at Audra’s tendency to go off on tangents, for example), and Audra’s briskly dismissive attitude (groping for the right thing to say after they’ve had sex, the narrator alights on ‘you look beautiful’ – ‘Audra humored me with a smile’). These incongruities are comic, but never broadly so.
July makes every effort to quench any ‘conventional’ eroticism, leaning into unforgiving details about Audra’s age, her skin ‘beginning to thin … like a banana’s but instead of being gross it felt incredible, velvety warm water’ (208), her ‘cunt-belly’ – her stomach ‘actually an extension of her pussy’ and, as a result of the narrator’s researches into the effects of menopause, and the effects of aging on lubrication, she gifts her own wetness to Audra, transferring ‘what I had to her’ (208). This last in particular feels very characteristic of July’s transgressive daring, delineating as it does a rather radical act of intimacy (211). We’re accustomed to the bodily gift of breastmilk – that, from mother to child, is sanctioned, but this is something else completely – and feels wildly taboo. There are dimly recognisable kinship lines: it could be seen as a gift from a child to a mother, or from a younger self to an older self, indeed the whole encounter can be read metaphorically as the embrace and acceptance of the narrator’s own aging body.
July remains adamant about the importance of humour in her writing (she describes it as ‘a saving grace about life’), but in dimming down the broad comedy, and moving away from the limitations of Cheryl’s naivety, she is able to make full use of her narrator’s greater sophistication in tracking fluctuations in feeling: the disgust, resentment and gratitude that arise just within the one encounter with Audra, for example. Her work has always challenged the conventional conception of the erotic as strictly circumscribed and somewhat precarious, but without the reliance on a character’s eccentricity, the erotic is perhaps able to emerge as more robust still.
Bibliography
Graham, Annabel (2024), ‘Miranda July Wrote Herself Out of a Midlife Crisis With All Fours’, W, 17 May, https://www.wmagazine.com/culture/miranda-july-all-fours-book-interview
July, Miranda (2015), The First Bad Man, Edinburgh: Canongate Books.
July, Miranda (2024), All Fours, Edinburgh: Canongate Books.
Schwartz, Alexandra (2024), ‘Miranda July Turns the Lights On’, New Yorker, 10 May https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/05/20/miranda-july-profile
Humour in the Arts 