Review: All Fours by Miranda July

In this fervid novel, a 45-year-old married woman sets out from Los Angeles for a holiday in New York after a windfall (a phrase from her writing about hand jobs is being licensed for a whiskey ad). Rather than flying, she plans to drive, taking a week either side to cross the country and back. But in the event she does not get very far, in fact barely half an hour down the road from downtown, finding herself in a motel in Monrovia. There she becomes fixated on a young man, Davey, who she saw at a petrol station and who works at a Hertz rental. She becomes increasingly entangled in his life, or he in hers, as her desire blooms. But that is really only to summarise the inciting incident in what turns out to be an almost picaresque plot of sexual shenanigans, in its own way as full of incident as any cross-country roadtrip, although she barely leaves the state.

The woman, the unnamed narrator, has reached a moment of crisis. Creatively, her artistic practice (which is never described but seems to be multimedia) is at a hard-earned peak. Matrimonially, she and husband Harris have reached an uneasy stasis, “like two diplomats who aren’t sure if the other one has poisoned our drink”. Sexually, she longs for something besides her mildly dreaded weekly liaisons with her husband. When best-friend Jordi describes initiating sex with her wife while they’re asleep, the narrator finds herself “bludgeoned by this vision of intimacy. It wasn’t a matter of having lost at this conversation; I had lost at life”. She’s regularly ambushed by flashbacks to the traumatic birth of her child; wonders at the inheritance her parents have left her. To top it all off, she might be perimenopausal. When, at the novel’s open, she learns someone has been photographing her house from the street, she finds that “worrying was the wrong word — more like hoping“. All Fours is a novel of manifesting incident to break out of the ennui of middle class existence. Regularly hilarious, July’s comedic timing, observation and talent for the nonsensical are top-notch. It’s gratifying, even in 2024, that a novel that explores the borders of heteronormativity does not double as a morality fable.

Like Fleishman Is In Trouble, All Fours satirises the economic condition of a certain kind of woman, the one who’s been told she can have it all, but finds that in having it all she has no time to realise her true self. The novels share notionally middle class protagonists but may be benefactors of unfathomable wealth (Fleishman Is In Trouble’s Rachel is the breadwinner on $4 million; All Fours’ narrator’s grandparents owned an apartment on Central Park in New York, although to be fair it isn’t clear if she inherited anything of it).

Where All Fours breaks much more interesting ground is in its depiction of desire. Fantasy is just that; like porn, the point of it is that it doesn’t happen in the real world. But All Fours allows for some of the narrator’s desires, both unknown and unexplored, to explode into reality, deliciously building and withholding like the most expert of burlesque. Like desire, All Fours is regularly absurd, often hot, and occasionally grotesque. Much of the novel has a surreal quality, because fantasies have dream logic; it’s never quite clear if what we’re reading is actually happening, or in her head. Does it matter? All Fours poses, and the novel is most absorbing when it lives in this tension.

Gay rating: 5/5 for queer characters, and a bisexual protagonist!, relationships, graphic sex and themes.