The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
An indie darling who loves herself too much
Lifestyle guide? Memoir? Miranda July’s book is clearly no novel
336pp, Canongate, T £16.99 (0808 196 6794), RRP£20, ebook £15.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
All Fours opens with a mystery. A man has been seen using a telephoto lens to take photographs of the narrator’s house. Is he a stalker? Our protagonist, after all, is a thinly fictionalised version of the author, artist and filmmaker Miranda July – “a woman”, we learn, “who had success in several mediums at a young age” – and she attracts some weirdos. Yet she finds the surveillance not just unsettling but a little thrilling, too. There’s an erotic charge to the idea that someone is working this hard to get a glimpse of you, even in an unflattering bathrobe.
This encounter with the photographer inspires our authorial stand-in, wallowing in an existential funk, to drive from the Los Angeles home she shares with a musicproducer husband and non-binary child to New York City. She methodically plans her trip, hoping it will turn her into a different kind of person. But she’s barely out of the LA suburbs when she hits an exit ramp and holes up for several weeks at a motel. There she becomes infatuated with a much younger married man, desiring him to the point where she decides to blow up her cosy life in the search for something more passionate.
In 2022, July herself announced she and her filmmaker husband Mike Mills were splitting romantically, but continuing to live together to raise their child. This is precisely where the book ends up. So call this a fictionalised memoir or a justification for breaking the usual bonds of matrimony, but it isn’t much of a novel. July quickly gives up on her plot and begins writing a guidebook to female liberation, which, according to her, is brought about through luxury bath products, polyamory and expensive carpeting. It’s like reading an extended advertisement for an allinclusive health spa.
When our narrator makes the split with her husband, she does it for the good of womankind: “I imagined getting up right now, slipping out the front door and finding that all the women in the neighbourhood were also leaving their houses.” There’s a long section in the middle where she has her hormonal levels tested and learns that she’s perimenopausal, whereupon July plies us with information about the effects of menopause on the female mind, body and libido. She even includes a handy chart about oestrogen production. This is basically indistinguishable from the adverts that I, as a middle-aged woman, am served up by Instagram algorithms.
For all the anxiety about how she’s perceived, July never considers the possibility that she looks ridiculous. The guy with the camera turns out to be someone in real estate who wants to let the narrator know her house is worth millions. The younger man she desires doesn’t see her as middleaged, invisible and pathetic; he’s a huge fan of her work. That admiration creates a kind of aura, a glow that covers up any imperfections. That’s how a book such as All Fours happens, I suppose: being surrounded by people who tell you how amazing you are.
It’s a shame that the novel falls apart the way it does, because there are some ecstatic sex scenes and a few good jokes. July’s husband becomes suspicious about her possible infidelity; she deflects him with an announcement that she’s going through the menopause, and he backs off immediately. There’s also a darkly funny bit about a grandmother who committed suicide by tossing herself out of a window, already shrouded in a jumbo-sized binbag to avoid inconveniencing anyone with the mess.
All Fours seems at first like a strange swerve for an indie darling such as July. She seems planted in the early years of the millennium, an age of aggressive whimsy in which her peers, from Dave Eggers in letters to Michel Gondry in film, explored the grandiosity of the mundane. July wrote books and directed films that wanted to awaken their audience to the overwhelming beauty of the world, but tended more often to show us how quirky their maker was. (In case you’re forgetting, she chose to narrate her 2011 film The Future in the soft, creaky voice of Paw-Paw, a stray cat.) But in the 2020s, it’s no longer enough for our writers to be confessional or creative. They have to be lifestyle gurus, too. It’s what sells, after all.