Miranda July’s new novel will make you blush

Multi-talented artist Miranda July has written an extremely sexual book about a woman approaching menopause, so of course it’s time for a square old man to pass judgment.

At your service.

But first, is it hot in here?

I’ve never seen such an explicit novel before. I felt so embarrassed reading “All Fours” on the subway that I tore off the cover. July 50 seems determined to cure the inhibitions of middle age by ridding us of any impulse to censor and immersing us in a bubble bath of erotic candor.

Although such a description might evoke the spirit of Anaïs Nin, July is too funny for that association. In these pages, she is scandalous and outrageously hilarious. With “All Fours,” perimenopausal readers finally have their own “Portnoy’s Complaint.” But even that comparison doesn’t capture the immediacy of July’s prose, its unerring timing, its palpable sense of performance. Indeed, several unforgettable (and incitable) sections have the snap of a transgressive stand-up routine.

The unnamed narrator – “a woman who has had success in several media” – is a close approximation of July, who has published books; directed, written and performed on stage and in films; and is currently presenting a personal art exhibition in Milan. Although “All Fours” qualifies as a novel, the space between the author’s life and the story’s protagonist is often no wider than a bra strap.

At the opening, the narrator, who has just turned 45, plans to celebrate by driving from her home in Los Angeles to New York, where she will see theater, visit museums and reunite with old friends. But the journey will be as important as the destination. During this big cross-country road trip, the narrator imagines herself becoming “the kind of laid-back, grounded woman I always wanted to be.”

She plans the six-day itinerary with marked tourist sites along the way. She prepares all the snacks she will need. She forces herself to sleep with her husband again. And then, finally, with some trepidation, she leaves for the East Coast. This will be the longest she will be away from her child.

Thirty minutes later, she stops to refuel. Then a meal. A sexy young man named Davey strikes up a conversation. He is employed by Hertz and his wife, Claire, works for an interior designer. “He didn’t ask himself if any of this was interesting,” the narrator notes. “All the handsome young men were getting minor celebrity treatment they didn’t know existed.” But she is not irritated; she is titillated. Although only 20 miles from home, she rents a room in a seedy roadside motel. That night, she told her husband that she had arrived in Utah.

His feeling of liberation is transformative. “I was free to do whatever I wanted,” she marvels. “No one to make breakfast for, no need to pack a five-part bento box, no need to yell: put on your shoes!” » Why should she bother heading back to New York?

July writes with a delicious sense of discontinuity – life as a series of absurd non-sequiturs – but big themes control her work. Here, she advances on a subversive highway that stretches from Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening” to Claire Vaye Watkins’ “I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness” — stories of women who come to consider conventional domestic arrangements like an artistic and sexual tomb.

The difference, however, is in the enjoyment July and her readers experience along the way. Convinced that she wants to spend the entirety of her two and a half weeks of vacation holed up in this motel a few miles from home, the narrator hires Claire to redecorate the room with a budget of $20,000 – the money she has recently won selling a line about sex. participate in a whiskey marketing campaign. While her room is redone with beautiful new carpets, wallpaper, tiles and furniture, she continues to lie to her family about her whereabouts – and begins an emotionally intense affair with Davey.

“What kind of monster makes a big show of walking away and then hides right next door?” she asks. “But that line of thinking was of no use. It was this thought that had stopped every woman from achieving her greatness… How many times had I turned back at the first self-doubt? You had to resist a deep sense of injustice if you ever wanted to go somewhere new.

This motel oasis, designed for his comfort, appears to him as a revelation and a revolution. But it’s basically Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” with KY Jelly. And that’s not the only thing that’s slipping. Yes, “All Fours” is much funnier and infinitely sexier than Woolf’s essay, but the novel’s financial naivety seems almost intentional. The narrator imagines that her newfound freedom relies on greater self-confidence and better orgasms, but it actually relies on better child care and better health insurance.

Unfortunately, little of this material reality appears in this novel, which appears to take place among a group of wealthy women whose personal autonomy is unfettered by politics or economics. Not that the narrator considers herself powerful or wealthy – privileged Americans rarely do – but her house has an estimated value of $1.8 million. There are, I bet, women in America who can’t sell a single sentence for $20,000 – or even half that. As for “All Fours”, for them there is no room in the inn.

But July also explores questions of a more universal nature. The narrator’s fantasy affair with Davey and his refusal to have sex with her triggers a crisis of faith. She’s never felt so overwhelmed by someone’s desire, and she’s never failed to get what she wants. “It was my first experience of being too old,” she says. “Now suddenly my desire has become gross, inappropriate.” Worse still, she realizes, this is not an isolated withdrawal. “From now on, this would be the norm.”

After returning home and attempting to return to a normal life, a visit to her gynecologist brings even more alarming news: given her age, her libido is “about to fall off a cliff.” Why hadn’t anyone warned her? “I had just come to terms with my sexuality about two months ago and so the thought of losing it… A sob escaped me.”

She is haunted by the stories of her grandmother and aunt, who both committed suicide by jumping out of the same window 23 years apart. “I was next in that matriarchal line,” she says. Could the cessation of appetite and sexual opportunities be the root cause? The only path that remains open, she asks herself, is it that of prolonged bitterness, of this kind of marginality which exasperates the narrator of “The Woman from Above” by Claire Messud?

“Most of us would never do anything very different,” she admits. “Our desire and our silent rage would be suppressed and seep into our children and they would hate it from us.”

In response to this grim fate, “All Fours” is a resounding “NO!” » brash, witty and libidinal.

The novel perhaps loses some of its narrative dynamism in the second half, but the narrator refuses to admit that the journey from exciting to happy must end in grizzled insensitivity. Perhaps, she suggests, there are ways for women to reorient their lives, their relationships, and even their fantasies, away from sexual futility and toward renewable pleasures.

Trying to predict the broader social impact of a novel is a foolish task; the fate of almost all books is oblivion. But something about “All Fours” — its outrageous sexuality, its offbeat humor, its sincere search for change — might, who knows, rally a generation of women who won’t give in to that vaginal dryness gently.

“Until very recently, we were all witches,” July writes. “We were chased and burned alive. »

Woe betide anyone who tries that again. This witch is not burning, but she is on fire.