PositiveThe RumpusThose who find fault with the unreality of July’s new book would be well advised to take its fictional therapist’s advice––advice that also serves as an aesthetic rationale for its elaborate, unpredictable, frustrating and occasionally implausible plot. To mistake the novel’s realistic trappings (office life, romance, grocery shopping) for an attempt at self-serious realism is to miss its underlying spirit of play. These intricate, vulnerable fantasies are what keep the novel––and its protagonist-narrator Cheryl Glickman––alive ... The First Bad Man uses the artifice of the performance in the service of intimacy. In the place of meta-fiction’s infinitely regressive hall-of-mirrors, July depicts a meaningful and messy portrait of our all-too-human relationships. As a long short story, a piece of absurd theater, and a memoir of new motherhood, The First Bad Man is also, somehow, (in Cheryl’s words) \'a great American love story for our time\' ... July infuses her self-conscious structures of mediation with the throbbing, immediacy of heartfelt feeling. Playing a game and falling in love aren’t mutually exclusive in July’s world; in the end, they might even be the same thing.