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.
It would be reductive to describe All Fours as the story of a midlife crisis, but July's highly self-aware 45-year-old unnamed narrator who considers herself a "minor celebrity" and "semi-famous" dramatically engineers a major detour in her comfortable, but far from emotionally fulfilling, life. Less than 30 minutes away from the home in Los Angeles where she lives with her husband, Harris, a record producer, and their seven-year-old ungendered child Sam, she abandons her "vision quest-style journey" to New York City, an odyssey intended to culminate in six days of luxury at the Carlyle Hotel. Instead, she holes up in a "shabby, pale-yellow stucco motel" in the town of Monrovia, Calif., where she spends the $20,000 she earned from licensing to a whiskey company for its ad campaign a "sentence about hand jobs, but out of context it could also apply to whiskey" on professionally redecorating her room.
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 (if it can be called that) 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 during the time she was supposed to be engaged in her cross-country trek trigger a profound re-examination of her life, one that provides a more revealing journey than any she might have experienced on a conventional road trip. Among other things, her relationship with her husband is fundamentally changed, as the two of them consider how they might move together into the future in a new way.
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. "I was a kaleidoscope, each glittering piece of glass changing as I turned," she tells her friend and frequent confidante Jordi, a sculptor. 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
Shelf Talker: In this wry and unconventional take on middle age, a woman abandons the cross-country journey she hopes will illuminate the path of her life only to find some answers closer to home.