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 L.A. to New York for work appointments. Instead, she pulls off the highway after 20 miles, books a nondescript motel room in Monrovia, Calif., 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 death-dread? 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. Part of it is her ongoing trauma due to the hemorrhage Sam suffered at birth, a rare condition that results in death for up to half the babies it afflicts. Sam fought to health but flashbacks still knife the narrator. What's more, she feels more alive during emergencies than amid domestic tranquility. She's stuck, in her art and life.
While in Monrovia, she meets an attractive younger man, Danny, who works at Hertz but harbors artistic visions and is a fan of her work. She hires Danny's wife to redecorate her motel room in opulent splendor.
She and Danny struggle against their powerful attraction, but "All Fours," animated by July's winning voice and what-could-happen-that-would-be-weirder plot instinct, turns out to be more surprising, bracing and extraordinary than a simple affair.
Still, the narrator doesn't discount the people who succumb to the mundane midlife narrative. Maybe "a few silly men in red convertibles" gave midlife crises "a bad name. I imagined greeting such a man solemnly: I see you have reached a time of great questioning. God be with you, seeker."
July's work in film, literature, and performance has always drawn on her personal experience but now, with autofiction reigning as a dominant literary tactic for more than a decade, "All Fours" fits right in with the work of Jenny Offill, Rachel Cusk and the rediscovered Lucia Berlin.
"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 dead serious.
Girls who grew up in the '80s passing around Judy Blume's "Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret," now midlife women, should share "All Fours" for its attention to many of the same questions: What's going to happen to me? What should I do about it? What does it all mean?
The responses July's narrator uncovers, so particular and unexpected, might propel readers forward to discover their own answers.
Jenny Shank, author of "Mixed Company" and "The Ringer," teaches in the Mile High MFA at Regis University.
All Fours
By: Miranda July.
Publisher: Riverhead, 322 pages, $29.
