I’ve been a huge fan of Miranda July since 2005’s Me and You and Everyone We Know, a film that remains one of my favourites nearly twenty years later. Amid a host of interwoven subplots, a small boy inadvertently has an online sexchat with an oblivious middle-aged woman, two teenagers perform oral sex on a classmate, and the same girls are invited to a threesome by a much older man. What makes this such an astonishing feature debut is that, despite all this, it’s imbued with an air of heartwarming innocence, because July paints a picture of lonely people seeking to make a connection they find themselves ill-equipped for. Her characters aren’t debased perverts, they’re just slightly lost people looking for love in less than ideal places. They’re us, even if we don’t like to admit it.
Nineteen years on, and novel All Fours finds an assured July still asking some of the same questions. In one sense, how we make connections with others in a world that makes little sense, when we ourselves are confused and broken, when all of us have realised that adulthood doesn’t bestow on us all the answers we thought it would when we were children, is the only question. It lies at the heart of all art and, arguably, all human experience. And July’s talent for embracing that dilemma, finding new ways to ask that question, and not to mention new ways of talking frankly about some pretty explicit subjects without them ever feeling… dirty, remains an astonishing gift.
Because All Fours is, it should be stressed, a very explicit novel. That the now-50 year old artist has written a novel about a 45 year old perimenopausal woman finding sexual awakening in a motel room half an hour from her house, husband and child when she’s actually supposed to be on a cross-country roadtrip from LA to NYC shouldn’t, perhaps come as a huge surprise. July’s personal situation (she lives and co-parents with her husband, and both their girlfriends) doesn’t seem entirely a world away from her protagonist’s journey, but there’s no reason that should be seen as a criticism. Write what you know. The sexual awakening in question is boldly and fearlessly described, but once more July achieves something few others could do – she avoids titillation in favour of seeing beauty, even in the unlikeliest of places. There is, counterintuitively perhaps, an innocence here. Less a naïve innocence, more the sort of innocence that’s the opposite of guilt. What transpires isn’t presented as something wrong, and July communicates this so convincingly that the reader is carried along and accepts the obvious truth that there is nothing inherently wrong in two adults consensually exploring new ways of physically expressing themselves with each other.
July’s fearlessness about asking these questions, her lifelong quest to understand how we work and how we can find each other as well as ourselves, makes her an eternally fascinating artist. Her skill at communicating this continues to grow. When the day comes that she steps back from public creativity, she will leave a legacy of work that could be as important as any author/filmmaker/artist working today.
All Fours is published by Penguin Random House, and is Miranda July’s fourth book, after the collections No One Belongs Here More Than You and It Chooses You, and her first novel The First Bad Man. In addition, she has written, starred in and directed movies, worked as a performance artist and released multiple albums.
James Kinsley 