IN THE FIRST PAGES of All Fours, Miranda July’s second novel, the unnamed narrator confesses to collecting intimate ephemera from her friends’ relationships. But the “artifacts”—“screenshots of sexts, emails to their mothers,” recordings of conversations—never add up to something substantial. Her impulse to acquire these relics is “like trying to grab smoke by its handle,” she says before wondering, “What handle?” July’s spacey, tender art chases the same evanescence across multiple media (film, fiction, dance, and performance). Her work aims to take hold of, and hang tight to, the ineffable attractions and connections that constitute a life. All Fours may be her most successful grasping yet. By its end, the phrase “hideously affecting” came unbidden to my mind.
I’m ethically bound to disclose that I have much in common with its narrator, an emotionally immature, eccentrically libidinous, perimenopausal married woman with a past in sex work who is perpetually panicking about aging into undesirability and, consequently, celibacy. Though she has many close female friends, the narrator yearns for the immersive intimacy most associated with romantic passion. She toys with the idea of connecting with her aloof husband, Harris, but she can’t commit to the pursuit—or even decide if she likes him. Together, they are “formal, like two diplomats who aren’t sure if the other one has poisoned [their] drink.” She enjoys the weekly sex she forces herself to initiate once it’s set in motion, but afterward, she withdraws into her “native state,” which involves “dreading the next time.” The obstacle is him—or who they are together—because, alone, she is sexually voracious, full of extravagant fantasies, and prone to bouts of compulsive masturbation that last for days. When Harris gives her a look that says, “We could be as one right now, if you really wanted that,” her eyes respond with nothing. “Certainly, sex would reconnect us,” she thinks after she neglects her dutiful routine, “that was the problem.”
It doesn’t take long (about forty pages) for our narrator to find a fixation for her restless and relentless craving: Davey, a younger married man she meets at the start of a promptly aborted cross-country road trip from California to New York. Like July, the narrator is also “a minor celebrity” appreciated by a cohort of indie-film enthusiasts, readers of the New Yorker, and fellow artistically inclined free spirits. As her own boss, there are few absolute demands on her time. Usefully, her art generates enough disposable income for her to indulge in expensive whims, like redoing the interior of the motel room where she settles at the start of her journey. And she’s just famous enough to worry about how her elevated status might influence a new relationship. The narrator suspects Davey is too ordinary to recognize her—he works at a Hertz on the outskirts of Los Angeles—but after days of building a charged friendship, she learns that he knows exactly who she is, and she is ashamed. “My fame neutered me,” she thinks, dismayed. Rather than wanting to be with her because she’s “a great beauty” or “so magnetic and witty,” Davey is no more than a fan, impressed by her modest cachet.
With stunning accuracy, July captures the inner vacillations of a woman trying, and failing, to convince herself of her sexual obsolescence. This type of falsely authoritative self-negation is one of the ego’s maneuvers when it anticipates looking foolish or being rejected, and its correlation with reality is tenuous. No matter how many times the narrator tells herself she is “too old,” her desire for Davey and the intensity of union he represents is irrepressible and has the power of a prophecy. After a week of tentative, platonic encounters, Davey reveals that he does want her. (“I jerk off after every time I see you,” he says.) Contrary to popular wisdom, she is still fuckable, still lovable, at forty-five years old, even if Davey’s marital ethics won’t permit him to fully indulge.
The narrator issues a similar series of experimentally definitive decrees throughout the process of falling in love with him. One moment, he’s not a serious romantic prospect because he’s “dumb,” checks Instagram too much, and is not talented; the next, he is the most transcendent dancer she’s ever seen and the only person capable of understanding the very core of who she is. When she watches him perform a dance choreographed for her, she thinks she is “entirely known”: “This is the happiest moment of my life.” The ambiguities of romantic obsession tend to bring on such grandiose and melodramatic thinking; the slow-filling outline of the newly beloved lends itself to idealized projection. But other people’s permanent opacity also means we can’t ever be sure that a lover’s degree of attraction is the same as our own. When Davey says the limitations placed on their relationship by his marriage are “as bad” for him as they are for her, the narrator is dubious: “I would have loved to have seen a graph of the relative badness.”
The intensity of her yo-yoing feelings—and her unconsummated craving for Davey’s “huge cock”—is depicted with such meticulous accuracy that an almost unbearable momentum builds for the first third of the book, an energy destined to shatter into diffuse agony when she goes back to her family. Returned to her real world, she is “too much a soul,” unequipped to deal with domestic chores and the requirements of raising her adored child, Sam. The narrator’s subsequent flailing brings on a major reckoning in her marriage, after which she and Harris decide to see other people.
THE CROSSHATCHED SIGNIFICANCE that emerges between strangers is a July hallmark as well as one of her great charms, and sex is her preferred arena of incident. She is fascinated by what sex, and physicality more generally, can achieve, namely surprise, revelation, and connection. Her depiction of sexual curiosity and mutability is regularly a source of relief for me, an implicit repudiation of the dour, limited way sex is treated socially and culturally. In her first film, 2005’s Me and You and Everyone We Know, I was exhilarated by the two teenage best friends who experiment with their sexual power by provoking an adult neighbor into writing explicit reveries about them on posters displayed in his window and who bully a peer into evaluating their respective blow job techniques. Past the halfway point of All Fours, the narrator and her husband embark on a poignant, hilarious role-play that helped me understand what might have united these people in the first place, and I began to root for them to stay together. But the second half of the book flags as the narrator starts canvassing friends about menopause, taking hormones, and figuring out the shape of her newly open marriage. Once Davey recedes into the past, she takes up with an artist named Kris, a character who remains vague and who “happily”—or so the narrator says—doesn’t come close to replicating Davey’s vibrant urgency.
July is extremely funny, which makes her narrator good company, but without the catalyst of intense desire, she can meander into less dynamic self-involvement.And her dedication to sexual unpredictability can work against the coherence of her distinctive characters, who sometimes feel shoehorned into the wrong plot. This was the case in her 2020 film, Kajillionaire, in which the gorgeous, vivacious Melanie pursues the awkward, prickly Old Dolio despite myriad discouragements of considerable magnitude. It also happened in July’s debut novel, The First Bad Man, when two women’s vicious physical fights eventually yield to sex. In All Fours, this engineered import comes when the narrator has sex with a woman connected to Davey’s past. The setup has a certain logic—if you can’t sleep with someone directly, one degree of separation is the next best thing—but in place of chemistry, there’s only antagonism and irritation. “There was no attraction between us,” the narrator says. “Her agenda seemed more self-help than sexual.” Why, then, do they do it? Because the author wanted them to.
Thanks to her frank, appealing voice and earnest appreciation for interpersonal weirdness, July’s failures are often more engaging than less ambitious writers’ successes, and when she pulls off her smoke-grabbing, it’s unforgettable. (What a poorer world we’d be in without the “pooping back and forth” motif from Me and You and Everyone We Know.) I didn’t mind the missteps in All Fours because I’d rather the risk be taken than declined. No one in July’s work is ever wasted. Everyone has the potential to be important, and that potential is usually fulfilled. Ten chapters after her first appearance, an antique seller met in passing is revealed to be a figure of crucial relevance. The narrator sees an artist’s name on a card in her sculptor friend’s studio and ends up sleeping with that artist’s ex-girlfriend. Everything could become something; everyone could become someone. (“What, you having a strangely intimate interaction with a stranger?” the narrator imagines her husband saying to her at one point.)
The wackiness of the narrator of All Fours is mild when compared to July’s character Christine in Me and You and Everyone We Know, a grown woman who puts socks on her ears in a department store while trying to court a shoe salesman, and the protagonist of The First Bad Man, a woman who telepathically communicates with strangers’ babies and, for a year, hosts her employers’ abusive daughter as a houseguest. But like those earlier projects—both of which I enjoyed—All Fours still suffers, at points, from artificiality.
The book’s end, even more so than the aforementioned sex scene, struck me as contrived. But that didn’t keep me from crying, and I won’t soon forget it (as, in truth, I forget so many novels that are more strictly realistic). The specificity of emotion—and the flourish with which it’s rendered—seeps beyond the boundaries of the book and stains the reader. “I could always be how I was in the (motel) room,” the narrator realizes; the “full soul” she felt in possession of while lost in love with Davey is not a moment with a beginning and end, nor something he bestows or withholds. The narrator comes to understand this through dance, not in spite of the form’s separation from so-called real life but because of it. Art’s elevation and estrangement facilitate the transmission of truth. If life is the smoke, art is the handle. What handle? The best, and the only, one we have.
Charlotte Shane is a cofounder of TigerBee Press. Her new book, An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work, will be published in August by Simon & Schuster.