Miranda July’s “ALL FOURS”

Fiction from The Top 10 Novels of 2024 by The New York Times

July even made me think of her as being a sort of 21^st century female Philip Roth. Roth’s My Life as a Man specifically was the novel of his that came to mind. The sex, the manic hysteria, the lacerating wit and sexual taboos. All of it sounded familiar when I thought of Roth’s book.

I’ve mentioned this in Substack Notes quite a lot lately: I’ve decided to read some of the brand-new, New York Times Top 10 fiction books out in 2024. Why? Well, for one thing, because I almost never read contemporary novels (exceptions being books such as The Girls by Emma Cline and Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh, among select others). And for another thing: Because I do not read enough women writers, past or present. (Though I do read some, of course. Who doesn’t love the brilliant Joan Didion?)

But also: I wanted to know what all the popular fuss was about. Why were people talking about books like Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo or Miranda July’s All Fours? Why were these women being nominated for awards, talked about everywhere, dominating the literary discourse?

I went into this process hyper-biased. I referred to them as “hate-reads.” I had a $200 gift certificate from Christmas/my birthday so I decided to read the books as mocking polemics; I’d criticize them brutally and have some fun along the way, publishing mean but honest essays on Sincere American Writing.

But then I read Intermezzo and fell in love with it. Despite Rooney being a self-described “Marxist” and boycotting Israel—two things I hate with a passion—I loved her book and after reading up on her and listening to some recent interviews I even decided I liked her as a human being.

Next on the chopping block—I figured this one would be easier to destroy and hate—was the trendy Miranda July and her 2024 novel All Fours which was at the top of the Ten Best Novels of 2024 New York Times List and which was a finalist for the National Book Award.

I rolled my eyes while rolling up my literal and metaphorical sleeves and dug in.

And of course I fucking loved it.

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First, some basics on July. (She legally changed her name as a teen.) *(For some bizarre reason I was conflating July with another woman author I thought had the last name of July but turned out to be the brilliant Nadine Gordimer. Maybe she had a story with July in the title? Who knows. Psychological associations are fascinating, right?)

July is 50. Born in 1974 in Vermont, raised in whacky, delicious Berkeley. (I lived in the Bay Area for a decade, from 2008 to 2019.) Parents were both writers and professors who taught at Goddard College and founded a publisher which focused on spiritual and alternative health titles. She was (and it sounds like she still is) into punk rock, DIY, her own odd, angular path. (Me, too.) She did performances at Berkeley’s famous 924 Gilman Street, where bands like Green Day and AFI and many other early 1990s punk bands got started, the famous Bay Area punk incubation station.

July went on to go to film school at U.C. Santa Cruz but didn’t last long. She ended up in Portland, where I currently live as well. She’s directed films, made short films, written novels and story collections, has done various forms of art. She’s friends with many of the bigwigs of the punk/art-house 1990s rock scene in the Pacific Northwest. If she were a band she’d probably be Sonic Youth circa 1985. She currently lives in Los Angeles. (Hopefully safe from fires.)

Anyway. Her book. All Fours.

~

The novel is a very “easy” read in terms of diction, tone, style, syntax. Basic words, simple language, understandable. First-person, past-tense, which I prefer much more than Sally Rooney’s millennial/Gen Z style of first- or third-person present-tense active voice (“John goes; John yells”). Difference, I suppose, between a 33-year-old writer and a 50-year-old (Gen X) writer.

The plot, too, is very simple: 45-year-old premenopausal narrator—a semi-famous visual artist—in a traditional, conventional marriage with a kid (a nonbinary “they” as it were, which I admit was a little challenging for me to read grammatically) says she needs a break from life, decides to go on a trip across country from LA to NYC solo, starts the trip and then secretly ends up staying in Monrovia, only half an hour away from her home. Here she meets a very attractive, much younger man, who is married, and they fall in love over the course of two-and-a-half weeks. The whole time they never actually have penetrative sex, but they do many other sexual things. And she lies to her family the whole time as well, stringing them along, making them think she’s plowing through Utah, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and then in Manhattan with friends.

Reading the plot on the dust jacket before I started I thought, This sounds patently boring and navel-gazing. Nothing happens. How could it?

But oh, how wrong I was.