Novel Readings

This was my favorite moment in Miranda July’s All Fours:

But this was no good, this line of thought. This was the thinking that had kept every woman from her greatness. There did not have to be an answer to the question why: everything important started out mysterious and this mystery was like a great sea you had to be brave enough to cross. How many times had I turned back at the first ripple of self-doubt? You had to withstand a profound sense of wrongness if you ever wanted to get somewhere new. So far each thing I had done in Monrovia was guided by a version of me that had never been in charge before. A nitwit? A madwoman? Probably. But my more seasoned parts just had to be patient, hold their tongues—their many and sharp tongues—and give this new girl a chance.

Staring down self-doubt! Daring to cross the sea of mystery to change your life! Overcoming that profound sense of wrongness that creates so much fear and inertia! Shutting up the inner voices that keep you from making the radical change you think you need to flourish! That’s what I imagined All Fours would be about: I thought it would be (because this is how it was marketed and also received, or that was my impression) an inspiring novel about aging, a madcap romp through the perils but also perhaps the promises of menopause, etc. etc. I knew it would be a bit “out there” for me, but I liked the idea of a kind of exuberant “fuck you!” to becoming an old(er) woman.

All Fours is all of these things, sort of, or some of the time, but it is also absurd, tedious, and unconvincing. Most of the way through it I was wavering between being amused and being annoyed. That bit I quoted is on page 51 and the novel is over 300 pages, so that’s a long time to be so ambivalent, and by the end annoyance had definitely won out.

I am quite willing to believe that my disgruntled reaction was my own fault—mine and the marketers’. Much as I disavow on principle that protagonists should be “relatable,” you can tell from what I’ve already said in this post that I decided to read this book for personal reasons: that I was hoping it would in some way resonate with my own experiences of being a woman getting older. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! That’s one of the gifts fiction has to offer, sometimes: illumination, insight, understanding, including of ourselves. But this woman, the woman in All Fours? I didn’t understand her at all, and I certainly didn’t relate to her. Is she a nitwit? A madwoman? Both, IMHO. The things she wants, the things she does, made no sense to me. And I don’t think that’s just because she is nothing like me in her values or behavior or priorities or vocabulary or anything else: I just didn’t believe in her as a character (which is a bit funny, I suppose, as I gather All Fours is more or less autofiction). The novel did not make me care what happened to her. Was this because I had started the novel expecting a connection that, to be fair, the novel itself never promised me?

I realize I am being vague about the specifics of the novel. It is a kind of road trip novel, except that instead of traveling across the country the narrator stops basically in the next town over, rents a hotel room, redecorates it (?), stays there, and starts a sexual relationship with a married guy named Davey who works at Hertz but dreams of being a hip hop dancer. The sex is pretty graphic but I’ve been reading romance novels for 15 years now so nothing about that was particularly shocking except that in romance novels the relationship is usually the point and here the point of all the sex is . . . I’m not sure, exactly, but I am pretty sure (though how would I know, I guess?) that the narrator thinks about sex and talks about sex and places more importance on sex than a lot of people. Certainly I have never had conversations like the ones she has with her friends with any of my own friends! It would just never happen—and I’m pretty sure that’s fine, it isn’t a symptom that we or our friendships are inadequate or repressed or inauthentic.

I did pick up that All Fours is “actually” about less literal things, like desire and freedom and expression and creativity.  Those are good things to care about. I liked this bit, about a dance the narrator decides to choreograph (if that’s the right word) and record as a gesture and invitation for Davey after their initial fling has ended:

This dance had to work because generally, going forward, things would not work out, disappointment would reign. My grandmother knew this, and her daughter. Everyone older knew. It was a devastating secret we kept from young people. We didn’t want to ruin their fun and also it was embarrassing; they couldn’t imagine a reality this bad so we let them think our lives were just like theirs, only older. The only honest dance was one that surrendered to this weight without pride: I would die for you and . . . I will die anyway. You can do that with dance, say things that are inconceivable, inexpressible, just by struggling forward on hands and knees, ass prone.

Well, I liked it until “ass prone.” She seems allergic to earnestness, this woman, but also addicted to shock, or attempts at shocking. We get it: you’re cool, you swear, you don’t conform.

Annoyance won out, as I said.

If you’ve read All Fours, I’d love to know what you thought. If I had just accepted the character as her own reckless, exuberant, sexy self, is there a good novel there I would have read instead of the one I ultimately found so bafflingly tedious?