...acerbically clever, radically compassionate ... July’s characteristic dry observational style can turn with equal ease to insouciant aphorism or to the lyrical eloquence with which she writes the extravagant, ungendering, transfiguring sex that takes the narrator to extremes of her own inwardness while forcing new kinds of contact and honesty, including with Harris ... By tangling explicitly with reality across mediums she pushes autofiction to new limits, revealing how good this genre is at questioning reality. How can the narrator make her own peculiarities part of a lived life? How can she get real in the face of death if what remains most real is art?
[A] witty, probing romp of a novel ... Animated by July's winning voice and what-could-happen-that-would-be-weirder plot instinct ... Rife with unexpected seduction, inventive sex and sex-adjacent acts that are somehow racier. The frankness with which the narrator delves into perimenopause and menopause is a revelation. July's work has frequently been described as whimsical or twee, but those adjectives can't convey the molten core of this book, which is at once hilarious and dead serious.
Brims with vivaciousness. It’s a novel that imagines the end of fecundity as joyful. All Fours envisions perimenopause as a second flowering ... A deliciously bawdy, emotionally rich novel about the whirligig that results when the physical and emotional upheavals of middle life collide ... Profound and earthy.
Wildly sexual ... Although such a description may invoke the spirit of Anaïs Nin, July is too funny for that association. In these pages, she’s outrageous and outrageously hilarious ... July writes with a delightful sense of discontinuity — life as a series of absurd non sequiturs — but there are big themes controlling her work.
One of the pleasures of All Fours is surprise ... Another is July’s ability to take familiar, everyday experiences and return them strange and new and precisely voiced ... The specificity of observations about the body is staggering. The novel excavates every sensation, every intriguing fold of flesh ... July’s novel is hot and weird and captivating and one of the most entertaining, deranged, and moving depictions of lust and romantic mania I’ve ever read ... In the end, however, it exudes the off-putting assurance of a convert and steers into the lane of self-help. As the narrator’s marriage evolves, the book falls apart. Her despair and obsession — the stuff of great literature — gets diffused into open and honest conversation, scheduling, and lessons learned. Everyone is very mature. This modern solution to the marriage problem may be a good thing in real life, but it just can’t pack the classic novelistic wallop of love and death.
About the binary of heterosexual love and the claustrophobia inherent in being a mother in a heteronormative family. More broadly, it’s a book about straddling two worlds ... In a move that rejects the traditional arc of the hero’s journey, she never even leaves California. But transformation happens anyway. The narrator rediscovers herself not by driving across state lines, but by standing a shadow’s length away.
Things get weird in that Miranda July way that some critics find the ne plus ultra of twee...and I happen to enjoy very much, with a few caveats ... In order to ride shotgun comfortably, though, you have to accept her preoccupation with the reflection in the rearview mirror; her indifference to any current affairs but her own.
Before reading All Fours, I was a Miranda July agnostic ... But All Fours possessed me. I picked it up and neglected my life until the last page, and then I started begging every woman I know to read it as soon as possible ... Masterful ... The book’s antic tone sometimes distracts from the story’s genuinely high stakes — July is never far from a joke, even in serious moments. The narrator wouldn’t be able to laugh at herself like this if what she was going through was actually super-painful, right? But in smaller moments and gestures, like when we see her obsessively packing five-part bento-box lunches for her kid, we glimpse real pain behind the character’s kooky defense mechanisms ... Miranda July has given women in their 40s something totally new to want, plus permission to want it. Like all the best gifts, this one was entirely unexpected.
The novel is a funny, sexy, and loving portrait of a forty-five-year-old woman’s journey to becoming herself, to accepting sexual freedom, and to lifting up the women around her in the process.
Through July’s unique lens, what we get is an absurdly funny, graphically sexual and wincingly honest depiction of one Gen-X woman’s midlife crisis ... As with all of July’s work, the novel is suffused with her offbeat, cringingly frank humour. There are deadpan one-liners on every other page that make the reader bark with laughter and much of the humour is derived from the mundanity of domestic life ... July balances a similarly precarious mix of humour and profundity without once losing the reader’s interest, and the result is a startlingly honest, vivid and funny tale of one woman’s quest for life after midlife.
Call this a fictionalised memoir or a justification for breaking the usual bonds of matrimony, but it isn’t much of a novel. July quickly gives up on her plot and begins writing a guidebook to female liberation, which, according to her, is brought about through luxury bath-products, polyamory and expensive carpeting ... That’s how a book such as All Fours happens, I suppose: being surrounded by people who tell you how amazing you are ... It’s a shame that the novel falls apart the way it does, because there are some ecstatic sex-scenes and a few good jokes ... It’s no longer enough for our writers to be confessional or creative. They have to be lifestyle gurus, too. It’s what sells, after all.
On aging, July is often blunt...funny...and wise ... July has always written unabashedly about the private lives of women. But this collection of perspectives, a casual ethnography, feels less like an ah-ha moment, a revelation of some taboo, and more like an intricate story with layered perspectives ... She’s not forced to grow up, to commit to a plan, or to accept the world as it is. But she’s not just escaping, either; she’s standing in a small space between fantasy and reality, where, for a moment, something near hope can be felt.
July brings a new perspective ... This is a tricky book to pull off. It could easily tip into bad sex award-worthy writing — at points you think, really, do I have to read about masturbating again? But I liked the narrator, despite occasionally losing patience as she goes about destroying her relationships. It feels like going on a night out with your most chaotic friend — great fun, but best enjoyed sparingly.
It is typically candid about sex and emotion – particularly sex ... Ultimately a kind of performance art, voyeuristic and exploratory ... This energy is contagious. By contrast, the final third, in which all parties evolve to reach accommodation, is disappointingly flat: wish fulfilment akin to self-help. Miranda July compels us with her provocations, not her conventional endings.
We hardly need another midlife crisis novel, marriage breakdown novel or sexual awakening novel, so it must be the singular ability of film-maker, artist and writer Miranda July – coming along to show everyone else how it’s done – that makes her new novel, All Fours, seem essential ... Beyond the quips, July has her eye on something richer and stranger ... July switches between modes in a way that allows comedy to amplify the sadness rather than undermine it. What comes next in the story it would be unfair to reveal, but it continues to balance that line between absurdity and emotional intensity.
If the other characters remain somewhat two-dimensional, this doesn’t feel entirely inconsistent with being inside someone’s head, at least in the book’s first half, when the focus is firmly on the narrator and Davey. The sketchy characterisation becomes more problematic, however, in the second half, when the narrator’s marriage comes back into view ... This is a welcome addition to novels addressing ethical non-monogamy ... Weirdness can get wearying over hundreds of pages. It’s like meeting a friend whose company is delightful for a drink but not the haul of a 10-course tasting menu. Still, All Fours has moments of brilliance, and kudos to July for writing about what it means to experience sex and intimacy when you’re no longer young.
There’s some harrowing marital drama in the novel, and plenty of hot sex, but there’s also a lot of ordinary complaining about menopause and motherhood, the kind of domestic griping that acknowledges bad situations but undermines the will to change them. None of it is anything less than brilliantly written, but All Fours arrives at a deeper level of feeling only near the end.
Not for the faint heart or the closed mind, but thank goodness because July is shaking up the status quo of reading, writing and living in ways that we desperately need.
An unconventional but engaging story about one woman's attempt to navigate the sometimes perilous passage through the middle years ... A frequently surprising and refreshingly original story.
Characteristically witty ... This tender, strange treatise on getting out from the 'prefab structures' of a conventional life is quintessentially July.
