Wherever You Find Me, You'll Find Me On My Knees
On Miranda July's "All Fours"
It’s the 21st century; now women in novels can leave their families behind, too. Between Dana Spiotta’s Wayward (2021, good), Claire Vaye Watkins’ I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness (2021, not good), and Miranda July’s new novel, All Fours, women authors have shown they can Rabbit, Run, too. If that old Updike plot of ‘man leaves family’ no longer thrills, well, there’s something about a mother’s connection with her children that gives ‘mom hits the road’ a bit more of a taboo feeling, gets people’s hackles raised. (How many years has it been since Kramer v. Kramer anyway??) Between this new trope and the decision to have, or more controversially, not have a child, we have a whole topos of books that can be written about for their discourse-generating subject matter rather than their relative quality. If the midlife crisis has been generally consigned to the male protagonist – man leaves wife and/or buys a stupid car (or motorcycle!) – these new novels of women’s flight also let the women have a share of the crisis, which seems more fair given the actual biological crisis event of peri/menopause. Maybe the whole genre needed rethinking anyway; as July writes in the novel, “maybe midlife crises were just poorly marketed, maybe each one was profound and unique and it was only a few silly men in red convertibles who gave them a bad name. I imagined greeting such a man solemnly: I see you have reached a great time of questioning. God be with you, seeker.”
All Fours was as close as we had to a ‘book of the summer’ among the literary set; racy, fun, something credibly beach-ready rather than another grim tome. With my finger always on the cultural pulse, I just got around to it now; maybe this will become timely again if All Fours wins the National Book Award this week, which would be a fairly funny pick ahead of four straight years of maudlin resistance-coded books winning. All Fours is a book that thrills for its commitment to left turns and off-ramps; wherever you think it’s going (roadtrip book, sexy affair recounting a la Ernaux, portrait of a devolving marriage), it always goes somewhere else, following an internal logic that continually moves away from the safe, the predictable, or the narratively convenient. Its first half is so transcendently good and novelistically exciting in both form and content that the second half is practically bound to fail, though on the whole July manages to pull it off by the skin of her teeth.
The narrator of All Fours is essentially July herself, give or take some (auto)fictional flourishes, and her milieu is not far off from her reality either. The ‘Miranda July’ of the novel is a multi-disciplinary artist with niche celebrity appeal, known by some and utterly anonymous to others. She’s married to a dependable kind of guy, Harris, who has “always leaned a bit traditional,” and they have an eight year old child, Sam. Their marriage isn’t bad, per se, but it’s a little stale, with metronomically consistent sex and a sort of normal husband/interesting wife push and pull. Flush with a bit of cash (a line from a story got picked up for a whiskey ad) and with an empty schedule – what else do novelist/filmmaker/performance artists do between gigs? – she decides to go on a road trip from LA to New York, spurred by the realization that she’s always been a “Parker” rather than a “Driver.” As Harris explains at a party,
“Drivers are able to maintain awareness and engagement even when life is boring. They don’t need applause for every little thing – they can get joy from petting a dog or hanging out with their kid and that's enough. This kind of person can do cross country drives.”
And to complete the distinction:
”Parkers, on the other hand” – and he looked at me – “need a discrete task that seems impossible, something that takes every bit of focus and for which they might receive applause … The rest of the time they’re bored and fundamentally kind of . . .” he looked at the ceiling, trying to think of the right word, “disappointed. A Parker can’t drive across the country. But Parkers are good in emergencies,” he added. “They like to save the day.”
And so our narrator heads off, hoping, like all road-trippers, to become something of a different person. “Why fly to New York wen I could drive and finally become the sort of chill, grounded woman I’d always wanted to be?" Thirty minutes into the trip, though she pulls off the highway and stops for lunch in Monrovia, and basically discovers that she is not just not that kind of a person; after a chance encounter with a rental car desk employee, Davey, she decides to book a room in a cruddy motel, the Excelsior, and stick around. (Park there, even!) Through some complicated reconnaissance, she gets Davey’s decorator-wife to redecorate her motel room into a luxury suite, making her near-staycation into a literal room of one’s own (“I had never really decorated, not with actual money.”); simultaneously, she begins a dalliance with Davey as her stay in Monrovia stretches from days into weeks. I say ‘dalliance’ because there’s not really a word for whatever the narrator and Davey have; it’s not an affair, as it’s strictly non-sexual (Davey won’t do that to his wife), but they become in all other respects almost painfully intimate with one another. (If I were one of their partners, I wish they would’ve just had sex, my god.) Things evolve and devolve from there; suffice to say, all road trips must end, and so too must unreal-feeling motel trysts, especially with a husband and kid at home. Going back to normal – taking the kid to school in the morning, packing lunches, scheduled sex, unadorned domesticity – just doesn’t feel right after a taste of pure freedom, and so the second half covers a sort of crazed attempt to find a way to live, and quite a bit of breaking and fixing things, including the concept of ‘marriage’ and ‘home’ themselves. The motel room is returned to, in a way, though you can’t ever go to the same place twice.
There’s no getting around it, July is just kind of twee; her sensibility will always linger on the precious and the quaint. A typical formulation might go:
Eventually I told Harris about the flashback and this was like pouring a cup of water down the drain, no comfort whatsoever. Which wasn’t his fault – imagine every person who has ever greeted a time traveler upon their return home. There’s no way to as the right questions, being so filled with a belief in the present. What did the horses smell like? That would be a good question.
You have to stretch a bit to imagine every person who has ever greeted a time traveler upon their return home (no one that we know of, yet, and would a horse even smell appreciably different in the past? A couple fewer baths?) Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s just a little affected, but the plot’s zippy enough to move past any groaners. But for most of this novel, twee has reached middle age and refined into something if not more interesting, then at least a bit more tolerable, perhaps because July’s observation has moved from primarily focusing on the external world’s oddities and obtuse hypotheticals to instead linger on internal sensations. There is a bristling physicality to the novel, an attention to limbs and fluids, even the most pie-in-the-sky lines are grounded in an intense embodiment; butterflies in your stomach is just as ridiculous a formula as greeting a time traveler, but it works because all of us, at one time or another, have inexplicably felt something like a fluttering in our stomach. And so July describes in lurid detail the sort of psychotic internal monomania of a crush – “If I’d been asked to carry a giant wooden wheel on my back, that would’ve been okay, too; external obstacles kept me busy” – and also the physical feeling of depression, which her father terms “the death field,” and also ecstatic moments of impermanent transcendence, as when Davey and the narrator share a dance:
Words kept you in two separate brains. Dance was the way to close the gap. What gap? How could there be a gap between any two living things when every living thing was so obviously one thing. It was handy that we were both human, but not essential, no, not essential. The beat was pure communication, there could be no misunderstanding and it could only draw things together.
These internal flares are matched with intensely physical experiences, as July follows the directive to feel everything as much as possible, in as much detail, masturbation, sex, everything. Imagining a consummated fling, she thinks “it would be real life. Real smells and wet tongues and cum and pubic hair and this would be astounding. The crossover into the land of physical intimacy would be like breaking the sound barrier or a plane lifting off, babies learning to walk. A new world would open up and yes it would be rife with new problems but oh the joy that would come from pausing, midsentence, to kiss.”
Alterity in all forms - a new world opening up - is July’s goal, as much as the book strays into what some call ‘pathetic literature’ (a bit like Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick) and other times into an exuberant mythology of the self’s ability to create meaning from communion in all its guises. July’s narrator is intensely curious – she often answers the narrator and the novel’s grander questions via a survey of friends and acquaintances – and, true to July’s performance art roots, she plays out thought experiences with her own body and then reports from the other side. Unlike other intensely personal books that you finish and think, “well, I’m glad that worked out for you,” whether its your nontraditional marriage or watching sports, All Fours has a sort of charitable spirit, one that doesn’t suggest you follow its path exactly but instead embrace a willingness to live a little differently. The instinct to retreat into the personal - in times like these! - is strong, but true community is only formed with deep trust, with vulnerability, with modes of care that require total honesty; little by little, one awakening at a time, the personal becomes not a hideaway but the strong individual atom of a burgeoning public. Or it can at least be the basis for a push-all-boundaries novel, which we can settle for in the meantime; the future we want can come sometime else down the road, or maybe we pull off to the side before then.
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