Weird From the Get Go

No One Belongs Here More Than You stories by Miranda July.  Scribner.  205 pp.  $18.00  ****

The First Bad Man a novel by Miranda July.  Scribner.  276 pp.  $18.00 ****

I have now read the complete prose fiction of Miranda July, and I must say I’m dumbfounded.  As I said before, I think All Fours is a marvelous novel; it might become the iconic novel for the women of her generation, though I don’t know where it leaves them.  Her stories are weird in the same way as the novel; they don’t take place on Mars, but the plots are so out of the ordinary that, while I enjoyed them as I read them, they don’t stick with me (there was one evening when I said to myself, why am I reading these goofball stories?  What connection do they have with reality?).  If she published a story in the New Yorker tomorrow I’d read it, but a whole book of them is like eating the Family size bag of Fritos.  They’re a bit much.

I’ll mention one example, which is not representative of her work but does represent my problem.  I was excited when I saw that there was a story entitled “The Swim Team” because I’m an avid swimmer and figured July might relate to that.  In a way she does; the narrator was once on a swim team, but for what sounds like her first job out of college, she’s moved to a town so small that they don’t have a pool.  She nevertheless encounters several people who would like to learn to swim (a couple of whom are in their eighties).  Confronted with this situation, she has the group to her apartment and teaches them to swim without using water, using (get this) large bowls of water to teach them how to breathe, and showing how to propel themselves around the small apartment with various swim strokes.

Obviously, this situation is absurd.  If you try to picture it—eighty-year-olds!—it makes no sense.  But the people love coming to see her, are deeply grateful for all she’s taught them, and even call her Coach when they meet in town.  The story’s amusing.  It’s funny to picture these oldsters pawing around the apartment.  It’s also slightly cruel, like an old-lady joke.[1]  And it’s totally off the wall.

I moved on to The First Bad Man because I figured her talent was better suited to the novel form.  In a way she takes up a classic story here, about a neurotic uptight woman who has an impossible dream (hooking up with a man who wants nothing to do with her precisely because she’s neurotic and uptight) and runs into a wild spontaneous human being who straightens her out.  It’s Zorba the Greek.  It’s A Separate Peace.  It’s all kinds of books.  I even wrote one.[2]  It’s a story we love to read.

The woman in this case is named Cheryl Glickman, and she works at a women’s self-defense nonprofit (a typical venue for July, a business that we suspect doesn’t exist anywhere in the world) where she is great at planning things and holding down the fort but also rather controlling.  Rather is an understatement.  The man she’s after is on the board of this nonprofit, but also on the board is a couple whose daughter, named Clee, is having trouble getting started in life and needs a place to stay for a while.  Cheryl, who likes to have every little thing in place, hardly seems a likely candidate.  Naturally, Clee winds up at her place.

Zorba the Greek Clee is not.  She likes to sit around all day and watch TV (immediately she takes over the living room couch as her home space.  And she insists that Cheryl start getting cable).  She consumes junk food and sugary drinks all day long, and when Cheryl says she can’t just do nothing, she gets a job at the local supermarket (where she stocks up on frozen dinners for the microwave).  She’s voluptuous in her looks, in a retro, 1950’s way.  She’s not the brightest lightbulb in the chandelier.  And she doesn’t bathe much.  Her feet stink.  We hear a lot about those feet.

She seems to feel contempt for Cheryl, though she apparently chose to live with her, and at some point they get into a weird series of dominant/submissive role plays.  They’re not sexual; she’s acting out the videos that the women’s self-defense nonprofit has put out, and Cheryl defends herself.  They actually come to like these scenes.  They’re satisfying for both of them, though they don’t talk about them.  We can see that Clee is making Cheryl bolder and more assertive.  The story is following the classic pattern.

In about the middle of this novel, I was vaguely bored.  I got the central point while not being convinced by the whole situation (convinced in the Miranda July world means you’ve accepted a totally unlikely premise, like eighty-year-old people crawling around the floor of an apartment while propelling bowls of water).  But in the middle of this novel something happens that is so wild that it breaks the plot wide open, and I read the rest of the book almost breathlessly.  I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough.  I don’t think it’s fair to the reader to reveal too much, but I will mention that Clee gets pregnant (who knows where or when).  That single event blows the novel wide open.

I’m glad I read The First Bad Man and even the stories.  I always like to see an artist’s development.  All Fours is a major step forward, as it would be from any early work.  But The First Bad Man is a novel worth reading.  Just don’t give up when you tire of the S/M fantasies.  There’s more to come.

[1] Alexandra Jacobs’ review of All Fours in the Times mentioned that July seems to have a certain animosity toward old women.  https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/12/books/review/all-fours-miranda-july.html

[2] https://davidguy.org/books/second-brother/