All Fours by Miranda July review – a miraculous midlife road trip

good writer can make any material sing. 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, was perpetually surprising and subversive: first, funny, then strange and, finally, emotionally devastating. Her new novel manages to be a bit of all three, though less firmly divided than before. Now everyone is older and things aren’t so clear any more.

What will the second life consist of? Well, there’ll be plenty of time for jokes, and July’s are among the best in the business. She frets about getting older: when a man in his 80s winks at her, she wonders: “Was that how old a person had to be to think I was hot these days?” She feels sexually distanced from her husband. “Sometimes I could hear Harris’s dick whistling impatiently like a teakettle, at higher and higher pitches until I finally couldn’t take it and so I initiated.

But beyond the quips, July has her eye on something richer and stranger, incorporating a stalled road trip, a sexless love affair, and a marriage taken apart and reassembled in a different form. Our woman heads cross-country to New York alone, but unknown to her family she never gets there. Instead, she stops at the nearby city of Monrovia, where she checks into a down-at-heel motel.

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