Like most really good books, The First Bad Man is summary-averse: It defies the demands of jacket copy, and the joy of reading it comes from seeing the odd, musty, intimate corners of a person's inner life treated with immense gravity and care. Few novels I can think of have such perfect descriptions of self-observation ... July is a master of the intimate weirdnesses of human thought that are both deeply specific and yet totally recognizable ... To see these everyday — yet deeply private — moments given serious artistic treatment is elating, like looking at a painting in a museum and recognizing your own toes in it. This cataloging of unglamorous inner life could be grotesque (and sometimes is) but there is something hugely generous about it. Writing about sex is a particular skill of July's — it is beautiful but real, not rapturous or misty or scene-lit. Her humor comes from a careful literalness: a dragging out of the truth, and placing it in startling juxtaposition with the surface of things. Again, she does this both with the big and the small ... Reading The First Bad Man, you are reminded that the minute and the magnificent are both real life, that the daily texture of things is as varied, intricate and fascinating as the great ruptures of human life, as tidal waves and revolutions and thwarted love.

July renders Cheryl with a combination of naïveté and wisdom. She understands little about herself or others in the world, yet she is able to float across lines of social and sexual taboos without a sense of guilt ... Since July writes Cheryl as a character who exists outside social norms, she is able to tackle social taboos in a way that’s both fresh and even a little cringe-worthy. Both Motherhood and sexuality blur. Sexual drive and the putrid stench of feet. Reincarnation and ageless love. July ventures to the edges of our comfort zone and then pushes on. Nothing about The First Bad Man holds back. This novel will be talked about for its ability to test boundaries, particularly the boundaries of sexual labels or forbidden love. But it’s worth mentioning the readability of July’s prose. Her success in carrying us through the strange world of Cheryl Glickman is a testament to her skill. This is a bizarre story, but an alluring one, and one that ends in a moment of satisfaction. July creates a character in Cheryl who elicits our empathy, but also a visceral response. Her conviction in her specific belief system makes her a character we want to understand, if not become.

July masters the art of submerging us comfortably in unfamiliar territory. Our narrator, has such a strong voice it is impossible to not be swept up in her world, full of the petty problems of everyday living and the dilemmas that come her way when a stranger comes to stay ... [July] reveals upset secrets about desire and sexuality, exposing them with the unnerving frankness of a surgeon. The strangeness of Cheryl’s thoughts are presented as simply a part of who she is, they are never excused or hidden. What should be daunting becomes instead a mundane mix of the obscene and the ordinary. There are times at which the hyperbole of certain situations does become tiresome, the constant pushing to surprise ironically tedious, but these features are redeemed through July’s execution ... Often it is at the ending of such deftly written books that the story snags ... So at first I was unsurprised when the end of this debut came up a little too short, a stop that left too many things unsaid. But July’s mastery comes in the jewel of her epilogue. It’s a finale that comes as a sweet and eagerly anticipated release, one that completes the book in unexpected and delicious euphoria.

What starts as an imposition turns flat-out hostile, the entitled younger woman acting like a predator whose chief prey is pushovers. The relationship turns physical in unexpected ways: not sexual or abusive, exactly, but also a little bit of both. And though that might sound like a dark turn for one of July’s stories—which tend to read like skewed but ultimately sweet fairy tales—it isn’t, not really. Instead, it’s another way for July’s damaged but ultimately redeemable characters to relate to each other and the world, and the beginning of a small story that she spins into something just a little bit larger than life. It’s quirky, yes, but also beautifully worded, emotionally complex, impressively but quietly insightful, and, in the right light, so, so funny.

The first novel by American filmmaker and artist Miranda July is like one of those strange mythological creatures – a sphinx, perhaps – that are part one thing, part another . It starts off tentatively, veers into derivative and wilfully sensational theatre-of-the-absurd drama – part Pinter, part Genet – and then mutates, miraculously, into an immensely moving portrait of motherhood and what it means to take care of a child ... developments are described in deliberately grotesque, even repellent terms, as though July...wanted to counter accusations of preciousness by being as gross as possible. Many of these passages simply come across as gratuitous and contrivedWhat powers the narrative over such annoying scenes is the subtext dealing with Cheryl’s loneliness and efforts to communicate. It is only when Cheryl transcends her self-absorption (which cause her to look upon relationships as 'games' or simulations rather than human exchanges) that she begins to achieve some sort of genuine connection. In the last third of the book, July also wriggles free from the self-consciousness that hobbles earlier portions of the book, writing of Cheryl’s discovery of maternal love with heartfelt emotion and power.

...very funny ... the until-then affable novel exploded my expectations and became unlike anything else I’ve read ... July is exceptional at tracing the imaginative contours of sexuality, and Cheryl’s awakening, though sparked by physicality, becomes most frenzied in her head ... Like many of us, July seems to have unbridled daydreams. Unlike most of us, she has wicked follow-through ... Miranda July is a woman, and a very serious writer who is also very funny. She’s challenging. Feed 'whimsy' to the birds ...The violence of the women’s relationship will probably turn some readers away, though I found no real shock in it, mostly a sense of glee and wild expansion ... The elision of all things external to immediate focus is useful in a short story, with its necessarily small span, and July is a brilliant practitioner of short fiction. But in this longer work, the elision feels like an artificial limit. The book ends in precisely the way any perceptive reader who reaches Page 8 would predict. By then, the novel’s conventional shape has neutralized some of its early strangeness and potency. The story is a smaller one than it promised early on ... The First Bad Man, which makes for a wry, smart companion on any day. It’s warm. It has a heartbeat and a pulse. This is a book that is painfully alive.

Those 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.

In The First Bad Man, July shows us a planet on which in no two grown humans live the same experience; they’re all wandering around in astronaut helmets full of swirling private language, and the best anyone can hope for is that their head bubble will form a kind of Venn diagram with someone else’s head bubble, if only for a little while. Everything is S&M: the fear of self-expression is so acute that adults ask one another for permission before they act, signing contracts to police their interpersonal interactions, and transferring their desires into what Cheryl’s therapist Ruth-Anne calls 'an immensely satisfying adult game' ... Though this is her first novel, July is an accomplished writer of short fiction, and within The First Bad Man live a handful of perfectly drawn short stories ... Within the context of July’s work, The First Bad Man feels, if not exactly regressive, than not quite a giant leap forward. And yet within the context of the wider world—in which all speech is policed, but especially women’s stories about their uniquely feminine personal experiences—The First Bad Man feels visionary ... few have Miranda July’s almost clinical facility with dissecting these types of processes, or her particular talent for couching what feel like naked, universal truths in clouds of the imagined and the impossible.

July takes us deep into the deluded, controlling recesses of [Cheryl's] mind: it’s not a comfortable place ... Clee, the daughter of her bosses, moves in. She is Glickman’s opposite: young, messy, inconsiderate, chaotic. The arrangement is appalling, until it morphs into something else, a kind of surreal dance that develops between the two women and culminates in a scenario whose bald facts, if written out here, would seem incredible. But in the skewed universe of July’s fiction, it makes a kind of loopy sense. July’s story, like her films, is eccentric, waylaid by bizarre detail and heightened encounters, a series of strange yet mundane events that somehow accumulate into a plot. But it works, and this is down to two things. The first is her style. If July wasn’t funny, The First Bad Man would be unbearable. But humour — of the observational, absurdist variety — rules ... The second thing is more important. Beneath all the comedy...Glickman emerges as a truthful character, not simply a vehicle for misfortune ... It’s an elegant portrait of loneliness — that it’s not simply a function of solitude, but a state of unexpressed love ... We don’t need fiction to tell us about reality from the outside — there are more efficient forms for that. July’s novel is the invisible made plain: it tells us how it feels to be in the world as another person, moment to moment. It’s an odd, muddly experience, but worth it.

...[a] strenuously quirky first novel ... Cheryl’s life and relationships take multiple unexpected turns in the course of The First Bad Man, although there is never much doubt that she’ll eventually get what she needs, if not what she thinks she wants. That is the skeleton of the plot, which is sentimental. There is a pleasingly shrewd, aphoristic element to Cheryl’s observations that seems to jar with the novel’s paean to love and longing at their most awkward ... July’s previous book, No One Belongs Here More Than You, was a story collection, and the short form, with its brief glimpse into a character’s life, is better suited to her aesthetic. It’s true that if you dig deeply enough, you can find something bizarre about almost anyone. When, however, the focus for nearly 300 pages is on a relatively small cast, the multiplying weirdness becomes unamusing absurdity ... It is not that such things could never happen; rather, too many of them happen to not enough people, and eventually you just become tired of them.

In a bizarrely touching first novel, July...brings the characteristic humor, frankness and emotional ruthlessness of her previous work in film, prose and performance to a larger canvas.Told in Cheryl’s own confiding, unfiltered voice, the novel slides easily between plot and imagination, luring the reader so deeply into Cheryl’s interior reality that the ridiculous inventions of her life become progressively more and more convincing ...Though these strange details sometimes seem to slide into heavy-handed attempts to shock, at their best, they deliver an emotional slap made sharper and more fitting by their oddity. A sometimes-funny, sometimes-upsetting, surprisingly absorbing novel that lives up to the expectations created by July’s earlier work and demonstrates her ability to carry the qualities of her short fiction into the thickly fleshed-out world of a novel.

July...successfully transitions from short stories to her first novel, introducing eccentric 40-something Cheryl Glickman in a tale about role-playing ... Cheryl and Clee’s simulated fights in the first half will remind readers of July’s peculiar short-story style, but the book hits its stride in the second half when Cheryl helps Clee through her pregnancy. July’s writing is strange and beautiful, with enough cleverness woven into the characters’ strange fantasy lives to keep readers contemplating the family roles and games adults undertake.