Review of All Fours by Miranda July

published in print in Issue 003 of The Whitney Review of New Writing

The narrator of All Fours feels revulsion at the idea that in middle age, what’s left of a woman’s life is post-climax, falling action, denouement towards death. A vision quest is what she wants, one in which she is led by intense and euphoric desire so potent it restructures everything it touches. This desire is a guiding force, like the white rabbit, or a wizard standing just a few feet in front of her, beckoning with its glowing lantern, taking her, once she lets it, towards intimacy so hot it makes her inventive. 

The narrator collects personal ephemera from her friends (sexts, emails to mothers) as clues to understand life itself. “Of course,” July writes, “none of these artifacts really amounted to anything; it was like trying to grab smoke by its handle. What handle?” Early in the book comes this sense of resignation, an admission that the desired thing (smoke, romance, a life lived passionately) is immaterial, and thus has no feature which would allow for holding onto it. 

In all of July’s books and films, she gives her characters permission to act based on a code more linked to human spirit than societal convention. As a result, at times the more civil-minded reader/viewer may wonder, basically, how are they allowing themselves to do that? Her characters act parabolically for us, as if in a modern fable, taking risks and making ecstatic symbols out of the awkward drudgery and mundanities we recognize from our own lives, but rarely let ourselves trespass. I have a friend who for years has wondered what people would do if she started changing the lightbulbs in a public place. July’s characters would, eventually, just change the lightbulb. 

In All Fours, the July-like narrator leaps into, and then through, this parabolic realm of her characters in order to transcend. Best friend milkshakes, nighttime motel parking lot dance, starry bathroom tiles that open portals: she discovers she has a ‘journeying soul.’ The novel form allows this parable to be rendered more exquisitely, more robustly quest-like than any of her other work, but also more totally granular, psychologically investigative, and realistic. To me, the clashing of these forces is so strong that July succeeds in donating transcendence: a structure of attitudes and actions grounded enough to reorder our own lives with, mythic enough to lift us beyond the quotidian and give us, maybe, a handle.