Liberals in the west love a false dawn and one such was in the summer of 2024. Labour won a landslide in the UK elections. Macron somehow leveraged the left to jujutsu the far right and keep his party if not in power at least in office. Kamala Harris briefly looked cool (‘brat’) enough to win the US election. Ukraine audiciously invaded a tiny slice of Russia. And capturing the liberal literary Zeitgeist came All Fours, a comic erotic novel about an affluent white woman’s mid-life crisis.

Miranda July’s second novel is often well-written and insightful. It grapples powerfully with the steady approach of the menopause (‘the First Great Perimenopausal Novel’), confronts the unevenly distributed decline in sex drive experienced by women and men, and the enduring imbalance that prevails in co-parenting: 

Without a child I could dance across the sexism of my era, whereas becoming a mother shoved my face right down into it. A latent, bias, internalized by both of us, suddenly leapt forward in parenthood. It was now obvious that Harris was openly rewarded for each thing he did while I was quietly shamed for the same things.

Above all, July likes to shock in the sex department. Her story’s abundant rutting is mostly masturbatory but there is couples sex too, same-sex and hetero, and a dab of role play, reflecting the nameless narrator-protagonist’s description of her vaguely artistic métier (‘unlikely couplings, unauthorised sex, surrealism, and a shit ton of lesbianism’). She is about to turn 45, the time when you start to contemplate —and are by no means ready to accept — that your death has has probably drawn nearer than your birth.

… Twenty years ago I’d been in my twenties; twenty years from now I’d be in my sixties. I was no closer to being sixty-five than twenty five, but since time moved forward, not backward, sixty-five was tomorrow and twenty-five was moot.  

If birth was being energetically thrown up in the air, we aged as we rose. At the height of our ascent we were middle-aged and then we fell for the rest of our lives, the whole second half.  

The rising to mid-life can take you anywhere, but the falling from it has only one destination.    

So she decides to go on a road trip across the States to seize ‘a last chance to get it together before winter came, my final season’. She does not get far, geographically, and instead splurges the windfall she’d earned from a recent job that had been meant for a swanky hotel in New York on an extravagant renovation of a room in the Excelsior motel — which goes ahead and does without the explicit permission of the motel’s owner, making it a sort of colonisation. The room provides the exotic backdrop for her unconsummated situationship with the book’s central conceit and fixation – the married carwindow cleaner Davey. They hang out there and have weird pre-first base encounters that climax when she spontaneously gathers his piss in her cupped hand and he reciprocates by slotting in her Tampax while she is on the blob. Davey then goes back to his wife to start a family and our heroine is left pining for his likes on her Instagram.

When something so life-changing happens you cannot unhappen it. Part 1 is page-turning entertainment of a high order, but in its second and third parts the engine of the novel stalls (‘I alternated between masturbating and cleaning’). There was no going back, so she needed to find a way to move forward, and so ensures the overly drawn-out plot of the next 200 pages, containing epidodes like her annual check up at the gynaecologist:

Praise God for the dentist, the eye exam, the yearly oil change, all the appointments I’d scheduled before Davey, back when I could do more than rub between my legs.

She sits age-wise between the young pregnant woman with all before her ‘the very center of the universe’, and a woman in her 70s and wonders,  

How did it feel to still be dragging your pussy into this same office, decades after all the reproductive fanfare. 

The narrative here drifts into Bildungsroman where through a medley of experiences she is able to restabilise. I found myself skipping over chapters of turgid narcissism. Eventually she does makes it to New York, this time for the launch of her own book, and while she’s there attends, enraptured, a dance performance by Davey which brings closure to her journey, her mid-life crisis thus resolved into a U-curve. Congratulations.

Few characters if any are likeable, even fewer are plausible. This is curated lifestyle porn for the wokerati. But there was something that unsettled me about the depiction of Davey and his ‘function’ in the novel which seemed to involve a thinly-veiled objectification of a black man. He is presented as an exceptional ‘’hip hop dancer’’ with a perfect bod and massive schlong who lives in Monrovia, a city in LA County which shares the name of the capital of a state founded by freed slaves. She does not love him, and he and his wife Claire – whom the protagonist had enlisted to transform the motel room – disappear backstage once their respectiev duties (philosophical sex toy/ home renovation) are duly discharged. In other words, he seems to constitute a sort of unattainable black messiah, like the object of Madonna’s gaze in her Like a Prayer video. When she imagines him … masturbating (needless to say) … she thinks of the “black rubber dick” she keeps in her cupboard at home.  

Fans of the book found this notion to be contrived, but it’s shared for example in this sharp critique of All Fours which cites Toni Morrison’s critical study Playing in the Dark where she analyses the ‘fabrication of the Africanist persona’. Later in the work Morrison writes, 

There is no romance free of what Herman Melville called ‘the power of blackness’ especially not in a country in which there was a resident population, already black, upon which the imagination could play; through which historical, moral, metaphysical, and social fears, problems, and dichotomies could be articulated…. This black population was available for meditations on terror – the terror of Eurpoean outcases, powerlessness, Nature without limits….

In such a reading July’s novel is the latest exemplar of what for Morrison is a major theme in American literature.  

We are all yearning for a leader. Someone to articulate eloquently as many of our entanglements, fantasies and foibles as possible; somone who makes the first move so we can follow. The gushing reviews, award nominations and fanfare around All Fours reflect its narrator-protagonist’s own fetishisation of Davey’s black messiahship. It also delivers the bucketloads of filth which the socially enlightened middle class secretly craves but whose successful digestion requires a generous seasoning of non-binary children and other casual progressive tropes.

This is not to denigrate the writer, an original, versatile and witty artist. Like much of her work exploring the absurdities of people and their relationships, All Fours is instructive reading for men who need get over their phallogocentrism. Ultimately, the author is not the narrator. A year on from the ‘brat summer’ which promptly disappeared up its own smug rectum, it may be that the ultimate joke in All Fours is on the reader themself.

[Photo by David Jordan – Own work (Original text: self-made), CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7867204%5D