The premise of her second novel All Fours is simple enough but also as strange as one would expect from Miranda July. An unnamed 45-year-old woman who is a writer/artist of modest fame plans a solo drive to New York City from her home in Los Angeles to celebrate a career success, leaving her husband and child behind. But about 30 minutes from home she encounters a young man named Davey at a gas station and feels an intense romantic pull. She checks into a hotel and proceeds to have a two-week affair with this man, who turns out to be a fan of her work. When she returns to LA, she finds it impossible to reintegrate herself into the heteronormative and monogamous framework of her life and must rethink and recalibrate her identity and relationships.

July captures desperate sexual yearning and the frenzied joy of falling in love vividly and intensely — the narrator is undone by ...