Miranda July's 'All Fours'

5 observations about Miranda July's new novel

On May 14, Miranda July published her fourth book, All Fours, a novel about an artist who leaves her L.A. home on a solo cross-country roadtrip, but only makes it a half-hour from the city before parking herself at a motel. While the physical margin between her and her family remains minimal, her sense of not belonging to them expands, and she finds herself accidentally imagining and building another kind of life.

Not unlike July’s protagonist, who plots an unfulfilled collaboration with pop star ‘Arkanda’ (possibly a cipher for Rihanna?), I read All Fours this spring anticipating an interview with July that has not (yet!?) materialised. Such is the fickle nature of freelance writing, but this is also what I made No Outlet for—quite literally, it is meant to be a space for thoughts and projects which otherwise have no publication/permanent home attached.

Here are five quick observations on July’s newest work:

1. I am struck by the possible correspondences between All Fours and something like Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood (1936). In Barnes’ novel, a character named Robin is a chronic wanderer, leaving both her husband and child to walk across entire European countries, and later also fleeing the home of her lover Nora, who becomes obsessed with every object or item of furniture that Robin has touched. Robin’s skin is supposed to be porous, described as breathing and smelling like fungi, and so her embodiment becomes a way of thinking about borderlessness and the anxiety provoked by women who are no longer domesticated, but becoming highly mobile (even peripatetic). 100 years later, in July’s novel, the protagonist becomes similarly fixated on the fear that she has settled somewhere that does not have room for all of her longing, as July mines the tension between obligation and freedom, confinement and adventure, or what she calls “that funny little abandoned feeling one gets a million times a day in a domestic setting.” Robin leaves the home to seek anonymity, just as July’s protagonist admits to “forever wanting to know what it feels like to be other people.” The title of course (All Fours) also made me think of Nightwood’s final tableau, in which Robin’s unpredictable body at last seems to have ceased walking as she collapses onto her hands and knees, barking like a dog. There is something about the combination of wildness and proneness that I think July takes a shine to here, whether she is wilfully referencing Barnes or not.
   
   

2. Much like Emma Goldman, who allegedly-but-probably-did-not say “if I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution,” July might be tempted to declare something along the same lines, like “if I can’t dance, it’s not my book/film/Instagram post.” I haven’t seen her film The Future (2011) because it is not available in Canada, but I have seen the clips of its very memorable t-shirt dance (see above). In All Fours, July’s artist protagonist takes up dance as a kind of summoning spell. She goes to the gym to start training for a particular performance that she will stage one fateful night in the hopes of drawing someone she loves and misses back to her—dance has a similar quality, then, to love, in both its intensity of feeling and ephemerality: “nothing was more fleeting than a dance—dance says: Joy is only now. So I gave up on everything but now.” Dance occupies a gap between what you feel and what you can describe, between different kinds of knowledge. “Words kept you in two separate brains. Dance was the way to close the gap.” It is intimacy without capture, clarity, or translatability, just pure transmission.
   
   

3. I really loved how July wrote about bodies in this book, particularly the relatable sense of never caring for/about your body because it doesn’t seem to promise as much as something like building a body of work: “exercise just seemed like a lot of investment in a temporary body. Wasn’t it smarter to spend your time making things that could live on after that body died? That had been my stance until now.” I’ve felt similarly both throughout my life and in this year, having long ignored my body out of dislike and discomfort, before recently arriving at the conclusion that it maybe needs to be looked after…. that maybe I need and even want to care about it! For July, a lot of this has to do with ageing, and her sense of becoming undesirable in her 40s, because “so much of what [she] had thought of as femininity was really just youth.” July’s protagonist has felt her existence as “a body for other people” but not “for herself.” As she enters menopause, she initially fears losing her body, but then discovers that she is actually getting it back—that it has never been hers, but now for the first time might be.
   
   

4. All Fours’ tense relationship to loss also comes through the protagonist’s experience with fetal-maternal hemorrhage, wherein her child nearly dies during birth and survives quite miraculously. Years later, the protagonist continues to have flashbacks to those days at the hospital and becomes attached to forums for parents who have gone through the same event, though she never finds any posts by those whose babies survived. For July, then, the repeated fear of loss becomes a way to think about parenting in general, always dogged by the worry of whether she is doing right by her (brilliant) child, protecting them, reaching out to them. Everyday they get closer to an age in which their relationship will change: loss of the child is an anxiety that is both spectacular and violent, as well as baked into the everyday facts of parenting. This is particularly acute when the protagonist returns from her ‘trip’ and finds herself disconnected from the “grit” or routine of being a mom: “I was a throbbing, amorphous ball of light trying to get my head around a motherly, wifely human form.” What a bizarre set of choreographies and affects she has to assume to make The Family, in all of its fragility and complexity, work.
   
   

5. Early on, the protagonist believes she has to accept that she cannot always be herself, that this indulgence is what her art is for; but later, suddenly, the prospect of making a life becomes itself a creative endeavour. When she is working, “life, usually so frustratingly scattered and elusive, came under my spell; I could name each thing, no matter how obscure, and it would open to me as if it loved me.” This same task is something that she brings to bear on her surroundings, approaching the refurbishment of her motel room (the one 30 minutes outside of LA) as if it is a creative assignment that she can order and manage. But it is also a space for living, and so “Room 321 was the cave and I was its guard. I had made a goddamn womb and I had oneness in it.” This is step one in reimagining the place of home and the shape of her life—by the novel’s end (sort of a spoiler?), she learns that Room 321 might actually be something that she can make everywhere, and “if 321 was everywhere then… I could always be how I was in the room. Imperfect, ungendered, game, unashamed.” Whereas art is initially her escape from life, life eventually becomes her art.

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Thank you for reading! This post was written in advance as I am currently travelling right now. I will save my Reading/Watching/Doing updates for a future instalment of No Outlet.