All Fours by Miranda July – Review

By Barney Bardsley

Miranda July’s new novel is definitely not for the fainthearted. Raucous, raw, and sexually explicit, it follows the journey of a 45 year old artist, as she catapults her way out of her steady (but boring?) monogamous marriage, and into a wild, experimental world of affairs, fantasies and re-invention of the self.

It starts straightforwardly enough. Our nameless heroine decides to take a solo road trip from Los Angeles to New York. She needs this – a bit of alone time, an adventurous moment away from her regular life. Except she never makes it to New York. Instead, she pulls up at a bland motel, a mere twenty minutes from home, and spends the rest of the “road trip” making a whole new life for herself: one of unabashed hedonism and surreal delight.

The first thing she does is spend all her money on a lavish re-decoration of her rented room, layering it with sumptuous fabrics and furnishings, even installing a re-tiled bathroom, a lushly carpeted floor. It’s the Arabian Nights on steroids. The motel owner doesn’t mind – he’ll be able to rent it out at a vastly inflated price to any future guests, after all.

The artist then begins a carefully choregraphed, unconsummated affair with a young petrol pump attendant. This doesn’t go the way she wants v do these things ever? – but it sets off a trail of longing inside her, which she tries to assuage by experimenting with women, and then by agreeing with her husband to a sort-of open relationship, where he, too, can indulge in extra-marital bliss.

“Turns the tables”

But here’s the thing: does any of this bacchanalian sex fest bring either of them “bliss”, except in the moment, riding a temporary high? Although there is a scene of light and liberation right at the denouement of the novel, the artist seems more often sad and lonely and confused in her quest for pleasure, than unburdened and free.

Indeed, beneath the rock and roll exterior of the story is the reality of trauma: the horror that the narrator experienced, when she gave birth to her son, and nearly bled to death. It is a trauma that July describes with brutal frankness, and re-visits throughout the book. Brutal, too, is her examination of the crisis many women face when they get to the age of the book’s main character: 45 – midlife – perimenopause. Usually it is men who are gifted a “midlife crisis” by contemporary culture, when in fact the sudden, shocking hormonal changes that women undergo, should qualify them far more accurately for that title.

Miranda July does not shirk from exposing these unpleasant truths in the pages of her book. All Fours is strong stuff, for sure, and doesn’t deal in subtlety or nuance, choosing instead the kind of sexual shock tactics that are reminiscent of the late experimentalist Kathy Acker. It is an uncomfortable read – and means to be so – but turns the tables fiercely and triumphantly on all those male writers down the ages, who have trumpeted their priapic adventuring, in the name of great literature. It is a tough, determined and daring piece of work.

‘All Fours’ by Miranda July is published by Canongate