Whether it's directing films or performing in them, fashioning visual art, or writing, Miranda July (The First Bad Man) has demonstrated she's a multitalented creative. That talent manifests itself again in her second novel, All Fours, an unconventional but engaging story about one woman's attempt to navigate the sometimes perilous passage through the middle years.
Less than 30 minutes away from the home in Los Angeles where she lives with her husband and their seven-year-old ungendered child, July's highly self-aware 45-year-old unnamed narrator abandons her "vision quest-style journey" to New York City. Instead, she holes up in a "shabby, pale-yellow stucco motel" in the town of Monrovia, Calif., and gets her room professionally redecorated. It's in that lavishly appointed space over the course of the next two weeks that she engages in one of recent literature's more unusual affairs with Davey, a man nearly 15 years her junior, who works at a Hertz dealership and dreams of becoming a professional hip-hop dancer. For July's narrator, the emotionally charged moments that transpire in room 321 of the Excelsior trigger a profound re-examination of her life.
July's narrator is, by turns, intriguing and exasperating, but her forays into her past and a future she struggles to envision are never dull or predictable. With an often wry but consistently provocative approach, July relies on her complicated protagonist's insight to interrogate a variety of weighty themes, including female sexuality, creativity, and the sense many have as they cross the threshold of the mid-40s that a clock is ticking more insistently. For all those reasons, All Fours is a frequently surprising and refreshingly original story. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer