Mary, Erica, Miranda

All Fours a novel by Miranda July.  Riverhead Books.  326 pp. *****

My original idea—as I mentioned in my last post—was to compare the outrageous women from different generations, my mother’s (Mary McCarthy), mine (Erica Jong), and my son’s (Miranda July).  I’d been reading Mary McCarthy already, I’ve read Erica Jong—and written about her—in the past, and I just picked up on Miranda July.  Too many women had been talking about All Fours.  I needed to read it.

It is fascinating how—in just cursory ways—the sexual landscape has changed.  Mary McCarthy was daring in the way she lived as a woman in the forties, but even she, at least in her writing, portrayed women who were playing hard to get (even while they wanted to be gotten) and acting semi-virtuous.  The man always used some force.  Erica Jong put an end to all that.  Not only did she jump into sex willingly, even joyously; she went at least halfway, if not further, in initiating.  She also—in some ways this was the biggest difference—talked about it a lot, and talked dirty; she was a child of the sixties (though her books emerged in the seventies).  She was brazen and shameless; she talked like a guy and had sex with a lot of men.  She was, in other words, like many women I knew (I liked her attitude).  She was a woman of her time.

(I realize that, in writing about these women, I’m conflating the author with her character, and that’s definitely perilous.  But all three of them left hints in their work that to some extent they were writing from life, though I have no doubt they made many changes.  I have no feeling that Miranda July actually did the things she portrayed in her novel.  I can’t imagine that anyone would do them.  But in some way she’s nevertheless writing about herself.  The writing gives that feeling.)

Miranda July has taken another bold leap forward.  I don’t know how representative she is of her generation, though a recent New York Times article claimed that her generation was the freest and most liberated about sex.  She talks about sex like Jong.  She actually seems obsessed with it.  She’s hot all the time, and masturbates several times a day.  (Neither of the other women so much as mentioned this act.[1])  She seems completely bisexual, and in fact has her most satisfying sex in the book with women.  (McCarthy never mentioned such a thing; Jong tried it and didn’t like it.)  She has a large number of women that she can talk to about such issues, a vast support network.  (McCarthy and Jong seemed less connected.)  She’s on the cutting edge of everything; she even has a non-binary child.  And when she does write about a sex act, she does so with a freedom that moves way beyond what the other women attempted.  I don’t know how things were in practice for any of them.  But on the page, July leaves the other two in the dust.

I would have to say, also, that she has left them in the dust as an imaginative artist, and as a novelist.  McCarthy wrote about things that may have been outrageous in her day, but she was conventional as a novelist.  Jong was freer in the way she wrote (I believe she was influenced by Henry Miller; she eventually wrote a book about him), but she didn’t break new ground in the novel form.  But Miranda July—as we’ve seen from her film career—is a true original.  It isn’t that she’s avant-garde.  She’s utterly unpredictable.  She’s as free in her writing as her character is in bed.

If I sat here and wrote down the plot of this novel, no one would ever read it.  It sounds not just implausible, but preposterous.  But as you’re reading the book, you don’t blink an eye.  Every preposterous event seems like bold hard realism.  July convinces us with the skill of her writing.  She’s a magician.

And I know, Mary McCarthy is in the Library of America, Erica Jong wrote one of the iconic books of her generation, but this is a better novel than either of them ever wrote.  It’s not in the same league.

The book is about a woman artist of some sort; she doesn’t specify, but says she his famous among the group of people who are interested in what she does.  It’s the way lots of writers are famous.  You know of them, but only if you follow writing.  At the age of 46, she is having a bit of a midlife crisis.  She has a husband and one child; her husband is also a freelancer.  They apparently make plenty of money—they live in L.A.!—but she’s just had a major windfall: a whiskey company has paid her 20 grand to have exclusive rights to a sentence she wrote.  They’re going to use it to advertise whiskey, though she wrote it about hand jobs (?).  She decides to blow the money on a trip to New York that will be wildly extravagant and shoot the whole wad.  At the last minute she decides to make it a road trip.

She gets as far as the next town over, where—entirely by coincidence, it seems—she meets and falls in love with a much younger man.  She doesn’t fall in love with his spirit, or his soulful side.  She falls in love with his body.

I had actually expected (I don’t know where I got this expectation) a book that was sexual in some whole new way, kind of the way Sexus moved beyond Tropic of Cancer (to Lawrence Durrell’s horror).  But for much of the novel, that wasn’t the case at all.  I spent a lot of time wondering if this woman was going to get laid at all.

It was still an extraordinarily sexual book.  She seemed always right on the verge.

This novel concerns a whole slew of subjects that cluster together:  an older woman and a younger man, the whole issue of marital fidelity, the question of what sex actually is (were these two people making love?), perimenopause, the rights of a woman to create her own sexual destiny, and the whole larger question of what freedom is in a relationship, what is freedom and what is slavery (with the understanding that it’s possible to be a slave to your desires).  There’s a moment in this novel where the narrator is trying to explain to her husband the kind of freedom she wants, the freedom she feels she deserves, and I, for one, had no idea what the hell she was talking about.  He was deeply hurt by what she said, primarily because it indicated something about what she’d just done.  He felt betrayed.

In a certain way, this is the same subject that McCarthy and Jong were writing about, the same thing that generation after generation has tried to figure out: how can we have freedom while also maintaining a relationship?  The couple in this situation make a valiant attempt at that, but I can’t see that they succeed any better than anyone else has.  As a close friend once said to me, we all want sexual freedom for ourselves.  We just don’t want our partner to have it.

Though I’m honestly not sure, at the end of this novel, how the narrator’s marriage is doing, the novel itself—to my surprise—ends on an affirmative high note.  It transcends the whole story while including it all.  It’s amazing.

All Fours is one of the most original works of fiction I’ve ever read.

[1] Years ago, I wrote a book about sex and spirituality entitled The Red Thread of Passion, for which I interviewed various sex experts.  When I had finished, one woman asked me what was the most surprising thing I discovered.  What I told her was that, in my generation, men considered masturbation something you did when for some reason you couldn’t have sex.  It implied that you were slightly hard up and couldn’t get laid.  The great sex experts of the world didn’t feel that way.  They considered masturbation a perfectly valid sexual act.