Miranda July's All Fours

Literary people love to talk about an author’s “voice”. I get what they’re saying; sometimes you pick up a book and read a few pages and you know without looking at the cover who’s written it. But I don’t always think certain authors’ voices are as distinctive as we like to make them out to be. With a nod to the true originals, authors are more alike than we like to admit. Exceptions still exist, of course, including, now, Miranda July. I’ve read a lot of books, and Miranda July’s voice is one of one. It’s not her sentence construction that sets her apart; many authors write the same succinct, tight prose, but rather the angles in which she approaches her content. She first demonstrated this via her debut, a short story collection called Nobody Belongs Here More Than You, and she worked out the kinks in her underwhelming first novel, The First Bad Man, and it all comes together with July’s second and most recent novel, All Fours. In it, she covers aging, desire, and creativity, nothing new, but we encounter those subjects as if given a special pair of glasses we’ve never worn before. Or, maybe we all keep a pair of those glasses in a secret drawer; we’re just hesitant to wear them. Thankfully, July isn’t, and in All Fours she shows us what we’d see if we did.