All Fours (2024)

Why this one?

I picked this up when it was announced for the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist, and was part way through when it was included on the shortlist. I chose it initially as it’s another one of those books that’s been much discussed over the past year and I was glad to have an additional reason to check it out. (Plus, look! There’s a recommendation from George Saunders on the cover! So it must be good.)

Miranda July (born Miranda Jennifer Grossinger; 1974- ; active 2005- ) was born in Barre, Vermont, USA to parents who were both writers. Raised in Berkeley, California, she later attended the film school at the University of California Santa Cruz, but dropped out during her second year and moved to Portland, Oregon. In Portland in the 1990s she became attached to the riot grrl music scene and took up performance art in the form of one-woman shows and short video projects.

She broke through to wider public attention with the release of her debut feature film, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), in which she also starred. It won the Camera d’Or prize at Cannes, and the Special Jury Prize at Sundance. She has subsequently directly two further features, 2007’s The Future and 2020’s Kajillionaire.

Alongside her film work and other art projects, she began publishing short stories in around 2005, with her first collection No One Belongs Here More Than You released in 2007. More stories followed, before her first novel The First Bad Man was published in 2015. All Fours is her second novel, and alongside the Women’s Prize nod was also shortlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction, losing out to Percival Everett’s James on a generally very strong list.

Thoughts, etc.

All Fours focuses on a 45-year-old woman who discovers she is going through the perimenopause. The unnamed protagonist in many ways resembles July herself, having a portfolio career of artistic ‘projects’ (not a ‘household name’ but clearly admired by many) and in a comfortable marriage, from which she has a nonbinary child. At the novel’s start she is in something of a creative lull and decides that to mix things up a bit (and against her normal character) she’s going to drive to a meeting across the country in New York, rather than flying. The journey doesn’t go entirely to plan.

She doesn’t make it very far before (less than an hour from home) before stopping off for gas and lunch, at which point she meets a local couple who attract her attention. She ends up checking in to a motel, and (having earlier learned that she needs $20k for something or other) commission Claire, the woman from the couple, to refit her room in a style reminiscent of a Paris hotel she once stayed in. At the same time, she becomes captivated by Claire’s husband Davey, a Hertz car rental employee. As the hotel room refit continues, she develops an intimate but non-sexual ongoing relationship with Davey, all the while continuing to pretend to her husband and child that she’s on a road trip to New York.

When she eventually returns home after her allotted few weeks, she is generally listless, missing the thrill of her encounters with Davey, and is further disheartened by a medical visit in which she learns she is in the perimenopause, and about to see her libido ‘fall off a cliff’. She determines to go back to Davey and enters into a fitness regime to prepare herself. Arriving back at the motel town, she finds out that he and Claire have moved away, and again reassesses her life. What follows is a different kind of sexual awakening, which eventually leads her to adjust her relationship with her husband into a non-monogamous arrangement based only on co-habitation as parents.

The first section of the book is a propulsive, gripping read in which you never quite know what’s going to happen next. There’s a superficial layer of whimsy (expected of July) but also an underlying darkness - even early on - driven by the uncomfortable scenario of our protagonist repeatedly lying to her child on the phone. At the same time, her encounters with Davey are intense and kind of fascinating in their non-’sex’-based sexuality. This builds further with the protagonist’s subsequent sexual adventures.

For a book with so much discussion around its representations of sex, I didn’t find it to be quite as fixated on it as I thought. Some complaints on social media seem to be talking about an entirely different book. When sexual situations do arise they are certainly unconventional and may potentially not be for everyone, but they are generally brief and scattered quite infrequently through the book. To be honest, the piece of writing I found most uncomfortable in the book related to an unfortunate incident involving a dog and a lot of mess, and that (to be absolutely clear) was in no way related to the book’s sexual themes.

What it is generally more interested in is a couple of issues that the central character is dealing with: first, her aging and the unfairness of the pace of change she imminently faces as a woman; and second, the ongoing and only semi-repressed trauma of her child’s birth, in which they almost died due to a rare and almost always fatal condition. The former is clearly the main line of exploration, and offers some satisfying depth and resolution (of sorts) via the polyphony of voices the protagonist calls on to help her negotiate those changes. The latter feels like an additional underlying motivation for some the character’s behaviour, but I didn’t feel it was as fully explored - despite providing a few particularly moving sentences.

Overall I enjoyed the writing throughout. It has an addictive energy and is peppered with sharp observations and quirkily amusing turns of phrase (one chapter ends with our lead character jigging about ‘like Humpty Dumpty, or some other lesser-known egg’ - a personal favourite).

Like other reviews I’ve read, though, I felt the storytelling dropped off slightly in the second half. In interviews, July has said that she had the Davey section mapped out and then wasn’t sure where the book would go next, and it kind of shows. In the first section, when the unexpected arrives, it does so with dramatic impact; in the second, there’s a bit more of a sense of drifting between unrelated events without much in the way of coherence or purpose. Within that section, there’s some more good exploration of July’s central focus on aging and the perimenopause, but other themes feel like they are wrapped up in a slightly unsatisfactory fashion (her birth trauma), not really given enough focus (the impact of her life decisions on her child) or just not very interesting (the dissolution of her second relationship).

Score

8.5

Despite losing interest somewhat in the second half, I still enjoyed this as a whole. The writing and embrace of the unexpected carries it, even when the plot loses steam.

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