Mom, stuck in art and life, sets off on adventure
“All Fours” By Miranda July Riverhead
Midway through life’s journey, Dante Alighieri road-tripped through hell,
Walter White ditched teaching science to become a meth maestro and the unnamed 45-year-old narrator of Miranda July’s “All Fours” tells her husband and child she’s driving from LA to New York for work appointments.
Instead, she pulls off the highway after 20 miles, books a nondescript motel room in Monrovia, California, and blows a $20,000 windfall redecorating it so she can hunker there for an eventful fortnight.
Midlife crises, when celebrated in popular culture, tend to belong to men. But July’s witty, probing romp of a novel asks: How should a woman respond to a similar punch of yearning, seize-the-dayism and deathdread? Particularly when women undergo a profound, unmooring hormonal shift during these years but are expected to serve as the mortar holding together daily life for family members?
The narrator is a successful, “semi-famous” artist creating transgressive work, married to a man named Harris and parent to 7-year-old Sam. She loves and values them, yet feels stifled. What’s more, she feels more alive during emergencies than amid domestic tranquility. She’s stuck, in her art and life.
“All Fours” is rife with unexpected seduction, inventive sex and sex-adjacent acts that are somehow racier. The frankness with which the narrator delves into perimenopause and menopause is a revelation. July’s work has frequently been described as whimsical or twee, but those adjectives can’t convey the molten core of this book, which is at once hilarious and deadly serious. (TNS)