All Fours

The Drive That Didn’t Happen

The narrator of All Fours — referred to as the narrator, not by name, in a move that creates a productive ambiguity about how autobiographical the novel is — sets out from Los Angeles to drive to New York. She is in her mid-forties, a semi-famous artist, with a husband and young daughter at home. The plan is a solo road trip: freedom, distance, the American road as creative renewal.

She doesn’t make it. Forty-five minutes from home, she checks into a motel. The drive becomes a stay. She takes the ordinary motel room and, with obsessive attention, turns it into something beautiful — wallpaper, art, furniture. She falls into a complicated, non-sexual but intensely physical and emotional obsession with a young man at the rental car counter. She stays for weeks.

Miranda July’s second novel begins in this arresting stillness and continues in the key of obsessive attention to physical and emotional states that is her distinctive mode. The novel is about what is happening to the narrator’s body and mind in perimenopause — and July is explicit in using that word, a word that most literary fiction passes over in embarrassed silence.

Perimenopause as Subject

The central claim All Fours makes — by writing it into existence rather than by arguing for it — is that perimenopause deserves the same literary attention that other major human experiences receive. The hormonal transformation of the years preceding menopause is, for many women, as disorienting and significant as puberty, as physically dramatic, as emotionally complex. It involves changes in cognition, mood, desire, body, and identity. It is almost entirely absent from literary fiction.

July treats it as interesting rather than embarrassing, as transformative rather than diminishing, as a subject that generates genuine questions about identity and desire rather than a medical interlude to be managed quietly. This reframing is itself a significant contribution, regardless of what one thinks of the novel’s specific execution.

The perimenopause material is the context for what happens to the narrator in the motel and after: the intensity of the obsession with the rental car attendant, the specific quality of desire she is experiencing, the sense of the self being remade under internal pressure. July is precise about the hormonal dimension without reducing the experience to it — the hormones are the occasion for something that is also about identity, creativity, freedom, and the gap between the self one presents and the self one is becoming.

Davey

The rental car attendant is called Davey. He is young, perhaps twenty, with a specific quality of openness and presence that the narrator cannot stop thinking about. Their relationship is not sexual — July is careful about this — but it is intensely intimate in a way that crosses the lines of appropriate behaviour for a married woman of her age and position. She goes to see him every day. She brings him gifts. She talks to him for hours. She decorates the motel room in ways that she knows, on some level, are for him.

This obsession is rendered without the distance that would make it safe — the narration does not frame it as pathological, does not provide the easy satisfaction of diagnosis. It is simply what is happening, in all its strangeness and embarrassment and genuine emotional reality. July has always been interested in forms of connection and desire that don’t fit comfortable categories, and Davey and the narrator’s relationship is her most sustained examination of this territory.

The Marriage

The narrator’s husband — kind, bewildered, doing his best — is present in the novel largely through phone calls and, eventually, visits. The marriage is not bad; it is simply not containing what the narrator has become. This is a specific kind of marital tension that July renders accurately: not the drama of betrayal or the clarity of incompatibility but the quiet mismatch between two people who love each other and are living through different transformations at different speeds.

The ending does not resolve this. July is not interested in resolution in the conventional sense. The narrator’s transformation is ongoing; the marriage’s future is uncertain; the self that has emerged from the motel period is not necessarily more stable than the self that went in. This refusal of resolution will frustrate some readers and feel like honesty to others.

July’s Prose

All Fours is written in July’s distinctive voice — earnest, observational, simultaneously warm and unsettling, capable of moving from the absurd to the devastating in a single sentence. The novel’s weirdness is not affectation; it is the natural register of someone who perceives the strangeness in things that other people have agreed to call normal.

The obsessive attention to physical detail — the specific feeling of the motel room, the specific quality of Davey’s presence, the specific sensations of the narrator’s changing body — gives the novel a grounded materiality that July’s work doesn’t always have. This is her most fully embodied fiction, and the embodiment matters: it is a novel that insists the body’s experience is as interesting as the mind’s.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — July at her most honest and her most ambitious. Not comfortable, but genuinely important.