BookBrowse Reviews All Fours by Miranda July

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A middle-aged artist reinvents herself and her marriage after a brief torrid affair.

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 her feelings for Davey. As their relationship progresses and becomes increasingly intimate, her desire for him borders on a medical condition. And indeed, there is a medical component. Early on in this adventure, the narrator encounters a graph showing what happens to a woman's estrogen production, and therefore, she assumes, her sexual desire and desirability, just before, during, and after menopause. She feels that this affair is her last chance to be an object of lust and this causes her to pursue Davey with even greater desperation. All Fours is unique in allowing romantic and sexual satisfaction to be absolutely central to a woman's happiness — and a middle-aged woman with a family at that.

It also becomes clear that the narrator's infatuation with Davey is born from a dissatisfaction with her life and herself. At a party, her husband explains that some people are "Drivers" and some are "Parkers." Drivers "are able to maintain awareness and engagement even when life is boring," whereas Parkers find satisfaction only in "a discrete task that seems impossible, something that takes every bit of focus and for which they might receive applause." The narrator recognizes herself immediately as a Parker but wants desperately to be a Driver — hence her decision to take her car to New York rather than flying. While this does not pan out as a means of changing her approach to life (she ends up parking 30 minutes away for two weeks after all), her dalliance with Davey allows the narrator to reinvent herself in other ways.

There have been plenty of recent books about polyamory, and it seems at first like this is where July will straightforwardly take her story — the narrator, who is queer, will return home to her husband and tell him she wishes to open up their marriage. But July doesn't take the expected path with anything, and what happens instead is more real, honest, and specific to the needs and desires of these two characters. It demonstrates that polyamory is a large umbrella for covering many different heads.

And for the narrator, perimenopause does not mean the beginning of the end of desire and desirability. Her fling with Davey is in fact the beginning of an awakening that takes her to unpredictable places and new horizons. At 45, she is reborn into the body and life of a person with full sexual autonomy, still married to her caring and supportive partner but free from the confines of monogamy and the erotic stagnation she experienced as a result. It's also worth noting that Davey does not exist solely as a receptacle for the narrator's yearning; he's a person with a life (as inconvenient as this may be for her) and his own ambitions and desires.

All Fours redefines relationships, intimacy (sexual and otherwise), and middle-aged womanhood, gleefully throwing commonly held beliefs out the window. It's poignant, erotic, and hilarious — often some combination of these three things or all of them at once. It's also a raucous, virtuosic ode to and deconstruction of sexual desire for the ages that places July in company with D.H. Lawrence, Roland Barthes, Nabokov, and Marquis de Sade. It laughs in the face of the notion that a woman's sex life after a certain age can be predicted or defined by numbers on a graph or medical theory. And it demands you laugh too.

This review first ran in the May 15, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.