🍑 on Miranda July’s All Fours
Female desire, the menopause, marriage, and being funny. Name checking Simone de Beauvoir. And Dogma.
23 June 24 | Vol 3 Issue 4
Can a novel be philosophy? If so, is Miranda July way too damn quirky to be a person to write one?
To assure recent subscribers that there is some ”consumerist philosophy” going on, if we allow Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea to be considered, then can I wave my copy of All Fours in the air? Like Sartre’s companion Simone de Beauvoir, who is credited as being a noted philosopher, writer, social theorist, and feminist activist, Miranda July’s new novel treads on all these toes. But in a quirky, oddball way: more whimsy, less béret.
It’s the first book I’ve read since Catherine Lacey’s The Answers where the moment I turned the last page I wanted to immediately start reading it all over again. Slowing down to digest it since I know what happens, like watching a film for the second time and noticing new little details.
You may know Miranda July as the voiceover for Fire of Love. Should that be the case, I’m sorry. I’m a fan and I lasted all of three minutes before turning it off. Her voice is the most incongruous choice for a film on volcanologists who burnt to death. Then again, maybe not. Chalk and cheese. Marmite. When you’re reading her novel it’s your own voice in your head.
Maybe you’re already a fan of Miranda July, so here’s the super short version (tl;dr). It’s her best work yet.
All the hallmarks are there but with an underlying seriousness, a depth, a questioning, that wasn’t as obvious in her previous writing. But you can see the seeds in How to tell stories to children from her debut, a collection of short stories.
Hopefully it’s not autobiographical, her ex-husband having his underwear washed in public, but having the protagonist being a reasonably successful artist her own age, allows July to discuss female desire after the menopause, masquerading as plot. But really it’s that de Beauvoir triad: philosopher, social theorist, feminist.
If you’re male and thinking ”Oh Lord, this isn’t for me”, think again, it’s funny. And there’s lots of sex. Lots of graphic sex. I’m undergoing hormone treatment, which means I have zero libido and erections are wistful thinking. So reading explicit sexual acts was a new and interesting experience, in my male brain processing them only as part of the story line, no titillation.
The majority of interesting books I’ve read in the last few years have all been authored by women. Having been kept quiet on the sidelines, watching, they offer fresh insights into society. Perhaps in not trying to write 'the great American novel', in a Zen way they produce something way more zeitgeisty?
In it there’s a chart of sex hormones over lifespan. My therapy results in exactly the same situation as the perimenopause, with the same symptoms. Having also had a mid-life crisis I can say I prefer a plot driven by menopause, rather than a man growing a beard and getting a motorcycle. Beneath the 'life as art' narrative lies an interesting debate about what marriage and child rearing means, and the monopolistic Christian view of it.
Again, I’m reminded of Simone de Beauvoir...
I think marriage is a very alienating institution, for men as well as for women. I think it's a very dangerous institution—dangerous for men, who find themselves trapped, saddled with a wife and children to support; dangerous for women, who aren't financially independent and end up by depending on men who can throw them out when they are 40; and very dangerous for children, because their parents vent all their frustrations and mutual hatred on them. The very words 'conjugal rights' are dreadful. Any institution which solders one person to another, obliging people to sleep together who no longer want to is a bad one.
"A talk with Simone de Beauvoir". The New York Times, 2 June 1974.
...except think kooky. Alanis Morissette as God. I immediately want to read I Love Dick by Chris Kraus, I loved the adaptation, but first you should read All Fours.
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This week featured
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miranda_July
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_de_Beauvoir
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Lacey_(author)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Kraus_(American_writer)
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