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A review by jdscott50
All Fours by Miranda July
emotional
funny
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
" Most of life is a vapor of unconscious associations, never bright to light."
An eccentric artist decides to drive cross country to celebrate a paycheck from a whiskey company that used one of her poems. She leaves her husband and child behind. Just outside of town, about 30 minutes, she runs into a young man at a pit stop. She runs into him three more times, decides it is a sign, and stops for the night. She then decides to stay in the room rather than drive. She pretends that she is still driving to her family. She ends up spending the $20,000 on the motel room in which she is staying. Giving it to the wife of the young man she stopped for. She has a pseudo-affair with him, but they do not consummate the relationship. He works off his sexual desire through hip-hop dancing.
A new Miranda July book should prepare the reader for a wild and weird ride. I like her fiction because it is so unusual and strange. It makes one think differently about perspective, even if it is a story where nothing really happens. She is manifesting a mid-life crisis, and it does generate a major change. She needed to make something happen in her stagnated life.
Favorite Passages:
“Without a child I could dance across the sexism of my era, whereas becoming a mother shoved my face right down into it. A latent bias, internalized by both of us, suddenly leapt forth in parenthood. It was now obvious that Harris was openly rewarded for each thing he did while I was quietly shamed for the same things. There was no way to fight back against this, no one to point a finger at, because it came from everywhere. Even walking around my own house I felt haunted, fluish with guilt about every single thing I did or didn’t do. Harris couldn’t see the haunting and this was the worst part: to be living with someone who fundamentally didn’t believe me and was really, really sick of having to pretend to empathize—or else be the bad guy! In his own home! How infuriating for him. And how infuriating to be the wife and not other women who could enjoy how terrific he was. How painful for both of us, especially given that we were modern, creative types used to living in our dreams of the future. But a baby exists only in the present, the historical, geographic economic present. With a baby one could no longer be cute and coy about capitalism—money was time, time was everything. We could have skipped lightly across all this by not becoming parents; it never really had to come to a head. On the other hand, sometimes it’s good when things come to a head. And then eventually, one day: pop.”
“For me lying created just the right amount of problems and what you saw was just one of my four or five faces—each real, each with different needs. The only dangerous lie was one that asked me to compress myself down into a single convenient entity that one person could understand. I was a kaleidoscope, each glittering piece of glass changing as I turned.”
Most of life is a vapor of unconscious associations, never bright to light.
“Although maybe 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. I imagined greeting such a man solemnly: I see you have reached a time of great questioning. God be with you, seeker.”
“How crazy and vain did you have to be to kill yourself when you found out that your main thrill, the thing that really got you going, was gone forever? Maybe not so crazy. If birth was being thrown energetically up into the air, we aged as we rose. At the height of our ascent we were middle-aged and then we fell for the rest of our lives, the whole second half. Falling might take just as long, but it was nothing like rising. The whole time you were rising you could not imagine what came next in your particular, unique journey; you could not see around the corner. Whereas falling ended the same way for everyone.”
“Because in truth it was like a bad dream, a nightmare. Life didn’t just get better and better. You could actually miss out on something and that was that. That was your chance and now it was over. I wondered if I would continue with my work and then I realized that my work was all I had now. I had gotten it completely wrong—I thought I was laboring toward a prize, but the prize was right there, I already had it, and work was something I could do afterward, after I was no longer young enough to be beautiful and could no longer be wanted by someone beautiful.”
An eccentric artist decides to drive cross country to celebrate a paycheck from a whiskey company that used one of her poems. She leaves her husband and child behind. Just outside of town, about 30 minutes, she runs into a young man at a pit stop. She runs into him three more times, decides it is a sign, and stops for the night. She then decides to stay in the room rather than drive. She pretends that she is still driving to her family. She ends up spending the $20,000 on the motel room in which she is staying. Giving it to the wife of the young man she stopped for. She has a pseudo-affair with him, but they do not consummate the relationship. He works off his sexual desire through hip-hop dancing.
A new Miranda July book should prepare the reader for a wild and weird ride. I like her fiction because it is so unusual and strange. It makes one think differently about perspective, even if it is a story where nothing really happens. She is manifesting a mid-life crisis, and it does generate a major change. She needed to make something happen in her stagnated life.
Favorite Passages:
“Without a child I could dance across the sexism of my era, whereas becoming a mother shoved my face right down into it. A latent bias, internalized by both of us, suddenly leapt forth in parenthood. It was now obvious that Harris was openly rewarded for each thing he did while I was quietly shamed for the same things. There was no way to fight back against this, no one to point a finger at, because it came from everywhere. Even walking around my own house I felt haunted, fluish with guilt about every single thing I did or didn’t do. Harris couldn’t see the haunting and this was the worst part: to be living with someone who fundamentally didn’t believe me and was really, really sick of having to pretend to empathize—or else be the bad guy! In his own home! How infuriating for him. And how infuriating to be the wife and not other women who could enjoy how terrific he was. How painful for both of us, especially given that we were modern, creative types used to living in our dreams of the future. But a baby exists only in the present, the historical, geographic economic present. With a baby one could no longer be cute and coy about capitalism—money was time, time was everything. We could have skipped lightly across all this by not becoming parents; it never really had to come to a head. On the other hand, sometimes it’s good when things come to a head. And then eventually, one day: pop.”
“For me lying created just the right amount of problems and what you saw was just one of my four or five faces—each real, each with different needs. The only dangerous lie was one that asked me to compress myself down into a single convenient entity that one person could understand. I was a kaleidoscope, each glittering piece of glass changing as I turned.”
Most of life is a vapor of unconscious associations, never bright to light.
“Although maybe 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. I imagined greeting such a man solemnly: I see you have reached a time of great questioning. God be with you, seeker.”
“How crazy and vain did you have to be to kill yourself when you found out that your main thrill, the thing that really got you going, was gone forever? Maybe not so crazy. If birth was being thrown energetically up into the air, we aged as we rose. At the height of our ascent we were middle-aged and then we fell for the rest of our lives, the whole second half. Falling might take just as long, but it was nothing like rising. The whole time you were rising you could not imagine what came next in your particular, unique journey; you could not see around the corner. Whereas falling ended the same way for everyone.”
“Because in truth it was like a bad dream, a nightmare. Life didn’t just get better and better. You could actually miss out on something and that was that. That was your chance and now it was over. I wondered if I would continue with my work and then I realized that my work was all I had now. I had gotten it completely wrong—I thought I was laboring toward a prize, but the prize was right there, I already had it, and work was something I could do afterward, after I was no longer young enough to be beautiful and could no longer be wanted by someone beautiful.”