Miranda July reminds us that the weirdest parts of life are also often the most familiar. Throughout her work, the attentive magnification of granular detail yields the kind of hyper-specific revelation that feels both appealingly unmoored and quietly profound. It seems right, then, that July’s latest, All Fours, should embrace that hoariest of genres: the novel of midlife crisis. Little artistic territory is more bourgeois, more laden with cliché, and—as July illustrates—more ripe with surreal possibility.
That’s not to say that everything in All Fours is unexpected. If it’s overstatement to claim that, à la Tolstoy, all midlife crises are alike, it’s certainly the case that they share contours. July’s unnamed narrator, a modestly famous 45-year-old Los Angeles multimedia artist (we’re solidly in the realm of metafiction here), has achieved the trappings of adulthood, albeit with scars. After having gone through a horrific birthing experience, she and her husband, Harris, now have a well-loved child and share a convivial distance, their marriage broken in—perhaps to the point of fraying. The sex is fine, if tinged with duty; they sleep in separate rooms. At a party, the narrator describes giving Harris their old salute from across the room, fingers touching foreheads: “There you are. He didn’t look away.… I smiled a little but this wasn’t really about happiness; it hit below fleeting feelings.”
In moments such as this, July expertly conjures the mutual recognition and weathered camaraderie of long-term couples. There’s appreciation and care, but also a sense of anxious detachment. When the intimacy itself is so ingrained, other inevitable emotions—excitement, desire—might seek exercise elsewhere.
And that, of course, is what takes place, catalyzed by the narrator’s plan for a cross-country drive to New York, a trip she hopes will initiate her into a new, more patient state of being. Somehow, though, she spends much of the novel unable to get east of Monrovia, texting erroneous travel dispatches to the home that’s less than an hour away, wandering generic streets and strip malls in incongruous outfits, and redecorating her motel room into a new, rapturously luxurious version of its former self. That the decorator she hires happens to be the wife of the beautiful if slightly ridiculous young man who cleans her windshield at a nearby gas station is not coincidental. The tone of deadpan retrospection makes this very funny. We are invited to wonder how much the narrator understands about what she is doing, even as July keeps us so close we feel as if we are watching this subdued cataclysm unfold in real time.
Everything that seems prosaic in this setup—the tired marriage, the vague wanting that finds outlet in lust—becomes revivified by the narrator’s dogged refusal to see it. At times, this ignorance feels willful, a quality July exploits for amusing dramatic effect. Explaining to one of her New York friends why she won’t be arriving, the narrator bats away the logical conjectures—an affair, menopause—even as she wonders if “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.” If there’s a half-recognition at work here, seeing oneself as a counterpart to those men with the convertibles remains a bridge too far.
And yet, somehow, by refusing to admit all the ways her crisis mimics certain clichés, July’s narrator manages not to thwart or succumb but to remold and refashion them. As it has in other depictions of women’s mid- and quarter-life crises, the suburban landscape here serves as both oasis and mirror, its anodyne appeal cushioning inner tumult even as its low-key, manufactured weirdness highlights all that is slightly unhinged about 21st-century domesticity. Unlike the glossy mythos of The Stepford Wives, where a façade of plastic perfection conceals an underlying rot, the Southern California setting of All Fours is less about hypocrisy than liminality, occupying spaces that, because they’re not really anywhere, suggest an alluring state of suspension—a way of remaining within and without experiences like marriage and youth and fixed notions about who one is.
As in all of July’s best work, the ecstatic, propulsive curiosity of All Fours inheres by refusing what is perhaps the greatest cliché of all: the notion that conventions and confines must be necessarily hollow and uninteresting, traps we fool ourselves into thinking are choices. Instead, in the deep, droll ways the novel probes the malleability of bodies and their demands especially, All Fours suggests that the way to finding something akin to satisfaction resides not in flight or disavowal but in transition and dialectic, which allows us to seek newness in the familiar and thereby make the newness comfortable. Late in the novel, another character asks the narrator whether she might want to make this way of living permanent, an idea from which she can only recoil. “The future itself was another lover,” she reflects.
But then, we don’t always get a say in what is and isn’t permanent, and there is much to admire in how All Fours resists the notion that one might ever have it all figured out. Rather like the novel itself—that most peculiar, familiar, and capacious of literary forms—all we can do is hope to adapt and absorb, and possibly remake ourselves again.•
