Review by zibbi_is_reading - All Fours

zibbi_is_reading 's review for:

All Fours by Miranda July

3.5

challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Ah yes, All Fours by Miranda July. A novel that doesn’t so much walk into the room as it flings the door open wearing mismatched shoes, trailing a philosophy degree in one hand and a vibrator in the other, asking, “Am I doing this right?” and not waiting for an answer.

I’d heard a lot about Miranda July. As if she was some kind of mystical oddity, best approached with caution, curiosity, and maybe a fire extinguisher. So I went in prepared. Or so I thought.

But yeah, I flew through it. There’s a strange sort of delight in reading something so brazenly chaotic, so unapologetically tangled, that it begins to feel less like a novel and more like eavesdropping on your most unhinged friend’s therapy session.

This is about a middle-aged artist, teetering on the edge of all the usual things (marriage, motherhood, mortality) sets off on a solo cross-country road trip. But she doesn’t even make it out of California. She stalls out in a dusty little town just thirty minutes from home, where instead of finding herself, she finds a local man, and promptly becomes obsessed with him in a way only a woman quietly losing her grip on her own narrative can be.

What follows is part spiritual unraveling, part erotic spiral, and part existential pinball, bouncing between the sacred, the absurd, and the uncomfortably intimate. One moment she’s contemplating the cosmic loneliness of female desire, and the next, she’s discussing buttholes with the kind of poetic gravity that suggests both might contain the meaning of life.

There are moments of real brilliance here. Those sharp, sudden flashes of insight that make you pause and squint at the page. July writes like she’s slicing open her characters with a scalpel and then making finger puppets out of the parts. The prose crackles with that maddening, electric honesty that feels half confessional, half spellcasting. You don’t so much relate to it as recognize it in that deep, shifty part of your brain that usually only wakes up at 2 a.m. to ask if you’re truly happy.

And yet, because of course there’s a “yet”, there are moments when the book tries a bit too hard. The sex is bold, but the emotional connection sometimes flickers. The story wants to be performance art, confessional, and manifesto all at once, which is brave, yes, but occasionally a bit exhausting. There are plenty of strange metaphors, abrupt shifts in tone, and scenes that leave you going, “…wait, what?” (e.g. the piss-in-hand and tampon scene just rubbed me the wrong way.) I also felt like the kid’s identity came across more as a statement than a fully fleshed-out experience.

Still, you can’t help but admire the sheer nerve of it. All Fours is part diary, part fever dream, part performance art staged in the middle of a nervous breakdown. It’s not tidy. It’s not safe. But it pulses with life, with questions, with the mess of being a woman trying to understand herself through art, sex, fantasy, and an absurd number of snacks.

You may not always love it. You may roll your eyes more than once like I did. But much like the woman at its center, it’s impossible to ignore and frankly, why would you want to?

Content Warning: Suicide, Sexual Content, Frequent vivid references of bodily fluids, Infidelity, Mental Health Themes

Content Warnings