Recommend: No
Disappointments cluster together with age. My left knee hurts on steep hikes; I wake early to get the first bus and it is cancelled; weekdays are gloriously sunny outside office windows but it pours on the weekend. And then Miranda July enters just before I crest thirty and forces upon me another disappointment: All Fours.
Halfway through All Fours I struggled to recall the plot of her debut The First Bad Man. All that came to mind were several dissociative sex scenes, replicated again in All Fours – nothing else. I reread the blurb online, and it triggered nothing. It was like I had never read The First Bad Man. It was then that the chills began. I liked this author, didn’t I? I paid $33 for this instead of Rachel Cusk’s new novel. But why did I do that? Suddenly I was disassociating.
All Fours is not a rewarding read. It is self-satisfied and ultimately useless. It’s marketed as a cross country road trip novel, yet the protagonist only makes it twenty minutes down the road. George Saunders promises you will “think anew about the nature of desire” but he must be on some off-brand Viagra because there’s nothing sexy about its laboured, weirdly consummated, completely unrelatable relationships. Watching the story unfold is like being tortured with a child’s puppet play, where the dolls are aged and dull and the confused conceit drifts longer than an adult’s attention span. Even the title is stupid. All Fours is a reference to doggy style as a sex position (I guess?), which extremely briefly mentioned as a favoured position because it is sturdy (I guess?).
My investment banking salary has aged me faster than I expected. I am now contextually closer to July’s financially well-off protagonist than any 25 year old Sad Girl Novel heroine. And I do have other similarities: I indulge whims; I don’t care for children; I fantasise about a life unconstrained from domesticities. When July’s protagonist departs home at the beginning of the novel in search of.. anything, I was there and ready. I had paid $33 for this journey outside of the family unit and into the existential self. But then July places her hands tightly around the escapism that shimmered promisingly in the first act and squeezes, tighter and tighter, until every drop is wrung free. The disconnected husband is not divorced, the affair with the hunky near-stranger climaxes with a dance and, most infuriatingly, the narrator scarcely pretends to care about her non-binary child while we are force-fed the pronoun “they”.
All Fours is your eccentric friend that you see at a party every now and then. Not unpleasant. Just off-kilter in a way that is irrelevant and inconsistent. And all the while a haunting sense of uncanny valley – am I that friend?
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