Monthly Archives: July 2025

Later Capitalism: A note on Miranda July’s ‘All Fours’

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This is not a review. Please go elsewhere for more rigorous evaluation. Instead, I am still struck by two problems a year and a half after reading and enjoying All Fours.

First, background: All Fours is the second novel by writer, artist, filmmaker Miranda July, which was published in 2024. I had been aware of July for years but never read her work or seen her films. Aside from her multimedia proficiency, she retains a genius for publicity. However, I never got around to doing the reading in part because of my allergy to wide-eyed whimsy, which seemed to me at the time to be the primary mode of July’s work.

Time passed and then I bought All Fours in an airport bookstore in Orlando, Florida, of all places. I found it quite good: funny, persuasive in its protagonist’s artistic and marital desperation, and productively frank in sexual matters that actually explored new metaphorical ground. Is it the first great, serious novel of perimenopause?

Parasocial note: since publication, July has begun a Substack where she chronicles her life as a newly non-married mother and sexual free agent, much in the way of the narrator of All Fours. I am hopelessly bored by ferreting out autobiographical connections between works of purported fiction and an author’s real life. However, post publication there were several trend pieces hailing the novel as an inspiration for perimenopausal women in various stages of bourgeois coupledom to “blow up their marriages.” The Substack functions as a coda to this parasocial connection and trend, which seems a bit cringe, as the kids say.

But back to the work. My first problem is money. How does the narrator make money? I know that she takes her trip, which ends at the motel where the first half of the novel takes place, using twenty grand she earns licensing a snippet of her writing to a whiskey company. But what about for the rest of the novel before she sells the book within the book at the end? I know that she’s married to Harris, a record producer, and while the decoupling from Harris is clear on the sexual consequences of the loosening of their marital obligations, it’s blurry on the economic consequences. Basically, who’s paying for what? I don’t disagree with the narrator’s groovy lifestyle. As mentioned above, I found her desperation, her frustration, her hunger entirely believable. But the novel ignores the money question as the plot progresses and is weaker for it. It never talks about the mortgage.

I’m not trying to be hopelessly middle-aged here, but it seems to me that modern marriage is a thick stew of interdependent obligations; it ain’t just about the libido. There is the mutual care-taking aspect, which of course accelerates as partners age. But even in a healthy middle-aged marriage, there is a division of labor, even if it’s not as rigidly gendered as in previous eras. What also strikes me is how un-jealous the narrator seems to be when Harris quickly and efficiently couples with a new lady and replicates a type of bourgeois hetero stability. I realize that the narrator’s desires have changed, but I don’t think that precludes becoming insanely jealous and wildly lonely — suddenly sentenced to one’s own self-reliance. The break up is very, very clean. And I just don’t quite believe it, even in liberated Berkley, California.

And then still the money, the mutual financial support, the who’s-paying-for-the-school-field-trip, the itemized deductions of family life. What’s Harris still paying for? And what does Harris’s new long-term girlfriend think of what Harris is still paying for?

To be sure, all of this mess would result in a wildly different novel, but it’s these amputated tentacles of complication that send out phantom questions through the second half of the book. No novel can be about everything, but the vision can sometimes narrow too aggressively and become too rosy.

Which brings me to the ending. The book goes on too long. We witness the narrator’s liberation and artistic rebirth, and then after that circle is completed, we accompany her on a trip to New York for her book tour, where she sees Davey one last time performing a duo dance performance, evidence of his artistic rebirth. I don’t think we need this in terms of feeling like the story has been completed. (Its true ending is on p. 310.) Also, it leads to a long descriptive scene of the dance performance, which seems to represent in movement the dual rebirth of both Davey and the narrator as artists, which is neat metaphorically, but is unconvincing to read. Or at least it was unconvincing to this reader. It’s hard to make a long passage of dance interesting in prose. I admit that I think dance, as an artform, is mostly overrated. (Sorry, dancers! I know y’all are working hard.) But trying to capture the import of this moment for Davey and the narrator is supremely difficult. July’s least persuasive scene is the one at the very end of the novel.

And then, our narrator walks out of the venue and strolls off into the sunset. Here is the ending:

“Gratitude came like a punch in the gut and because it’s always such a relief not to be an asshole after all, tears streamed down my cheeks. The person sitting net to me was also wet-faced and we smiled a little bashfully at each other because ecstasy has a kind of built-in ridiculousness. And it wasn’t just us. I looked out at the the circle of faces and saw that every single audience member was going through some version of my revelation, some reckoning with the self they had been carrying around until now. I had not even been the only one knotted in miserly pain; that was part of the ride. Resistance, then giving in. [Davey] was no longer ascending; he reached the apex and quickly fell.

Outside it was early evening. There was plenty of time. I decided to walk.

The sun was just beginning to set.

Golden light everywhere.”

The golden light imagery echoes the color in the room during the dance performance, which itself harkens back to the re-designed motel room that was the site of the narrator and Davey’s almost affair, and more important, the site of the womb-like cave she created and guards and is reborn within. The discovery, here at the end of the novel during Davey’s performance, is that the womb-room can be expanded, and its feeling of innocence and potential can spread everywhere — “gilding the whole neighborhood, the whole city.”

So the narrator is walking off into the sunset, yes, but also into this multiplied potential universal benevolence, and my problem is that life is not like that. At some point wishful thinking slides into delusion. This is one of those lapses in taste or authorial judgment that calls into question the entire aesthetic success of the proceeding 321 pages. Even the writing goes slack here: “punch in the gut”? “Tears streamed”? And everyone in the room is having some kind of dance-triggered epiphany? It’s really that good? Really? Far be it from me to suggest that man’s fundamental nature is one of intractable misunderstanding and loneliness, broken only briefly via found moments of harmony, but I could use a little more adult-level irony here. Cue the “there’s nothing like New York in the spring” clip from 30 Rock.

What actually happens next in the world of the novel is that the narrator has to keep on living, and living — as this novel has successfully taught us — only grows exponentially more complicated. The sunset is a bankrupt gesture that turns the novel into a fantasy, turns it into a cartoon. And the rest of the novel is many things, but despite July’s own sometimes too-wide eyes, it isn’t a cartoon.

Old people shouldn’t text

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“Yes, but when do you become old?” My friend said this as soon as I uttered my headline above. Usually he just rolls his eyes at my proclamations. 

But here me out: I’ve told my kids there will come a day in the hopefully distant future when they will need to sit me down and say, “Dad, it’s really dangerous out there, and it’s time that we took some of your privileges away. This is for your own good and the well-being of perfect strangers.” Of course I am talking about my car keys. This prophylactic move is itself an outdated gesture, since everyone driving now has half an eye on the road and the rest of their eyes on their devices, so that even a legally blind but fully committed driver is probably safer, actuarially speaking. But now I might have to have the same conversation with them about my phone, specifically its ability to receive and send texts to large groups of people. 

Basically, it’s too fast. There is not enough friction, physical or monetary. It’s too easy to send out decontextualized language to your friends and family and internet friends and probable strangers. I’m not really talking about the unconsciously racist uncle post, though sure, that too. The whole problem with frictionless near-instant global communication is that people have terrible thoughts, expressed terribly, encountered at the worst possible time. It’s the future! 

What I mean is simpler: at some point, texting should be disabled on old people’s phones. For the sake of this idea, old people are defined as people much older than me. You know ’em when you see ’em. The technology is too powerful, like using a light saber to floss your teeth. It’s barely wielded safely by the youths out there. It’s no wonder those of us post-30 are endangered by these devices. 

This is most easily witnessed in the group chat, the noise rock of modern networked communication. The first problem with the group chat is that it’s bad qua communication. I don’t need seventeen thumbs-up emojis to clock everyone’s agreement. Text is faster than a phone call, but then it leaves all this shrapnel in its wake. And then someone wakes up and responds as if the chat is a one-to-one communication and the jokes go sideways fast. Or worst offense: the responder starts riffing unknowingly on another person in the chat. A group chat can be a wonderful thing. But negotiating the rhetorical demands of the chat can be like trying to pull an eyelash out of a drawer full of knives. When I am compelled to respond to large group chats, my answers are fully denuded of flair, a single Y or N to questions, as if I had actually fulfilled that promise to myself and gone back to flip phone land. It’s like throwing a party; if you didn’t write up the guest list, you don’t really know who’s there. Proceed accordingly.

A young person’s response to an older person sounding off unawares in the group chat tends to take two silent directions. First, there is the Michael Jackson-eating-popcorn-gif response. I wish I were this mature and/or callous. The second response, my response, is to emotionally absorb and project all the potential social ramifications of this faux pas, which when given the number of group chats that I am in — even as a non-popular person who is not young — generates a lot of psychic stress. Call it something catchy like “emotional labor.”

And honestly, maybe that’s the real problem. Maybe the old person who needs to have his texting taken away is me. I am mostly okay with the sending of the texts. But receiving them wears me out. It’s just so much language. And there is no hierarchy to it. Reminders from my dentist come at the same emotional volume as kid school notifications or cries for help from family members. There’s a riot in my pocket, and I’m terrible at prioritizing. 

Have you thought about turning off your notifications? Yes, thank you, I have. The only notifications I receive are calls or texts. The people who allow notifications from anything else strike me as bent, or just much stronger than I will ever be. I’ve even silenced my phone completely, so that texts only vibrate, which has lead to missing actually important communication, thus strengthening my already substantial paranoia about giving and receiving and missing all types of messages. All networked communication has the seasick whir of the slot machine: the next one could always be big money.  

Perhaps the problem is similar to my email problem: I can’t stand to see any number of unread messages. I have to clear them out. I remember in the third grade when we got mailboxes at school and the utter thrill of discovering I had notes to read. It’s the same feeling, now split across actual physical mail (always junk), personal email (almost always junk), work email (90% junk, 5% need-to-know, and 5% act-on-immediately), and texts (5% junk, 30% unnecessary responses, 54% memes, 10% logistical negotiations, and 1% emergencies). Phone calls are now almost exclusively the arena of situations that need immediate attention. My family has been conditioned by my personality, so that when they call me their first words are “Don’t panic. I’m alright.” They don’t even say hello. In their defense, neither do I. My first words are “What’s wrong?” 

There are doldrums during the week when I don’t get texts, and then I find myself lonely and bored, and I start texting people, just to gin up some conversation. Perhaps the problem is that I don’t get quite enough texts. If I got a little bit more, there would be too many for me to deal with, and my need to liquify that little red bubble would wear down out of exhaustion. I often have the same idea regarding travel. I travel just enough to see how terrible I am at travel. But if I travelled more, then I would streamline. Or I should stop travelling altogether and go in peace. 

Which is what I think of texting. Perhaps I am the old person. Perhaps I am on the cusp of talking trash about someone on a group chat accidentally and hurting people’s feelings. Perhaps my kids should knock my phone out of my hand. I know that I don’t need all this communication to function in the world, but once it’s available, once it becomes a habit of communication, it’s difficult to imagine life without it. It feels like missing out, because it is missing out. The constant parsing of overwhelming noise is the bounty of a full and active life. If it’s too loud, you’re too old.

On William Langewiesche

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I suppose hearing about your heroes dying is just a part of growing older, but I don’t like it one goddamned bit. 

This feeling is prompted by news of the recent death of William Langewiesche at 70 from prostate cancer. Langewiesche was known for his reportage in The Atlantic Monthly beginning in the 90s. As a former pilot he wrote frequently about airplane crashes, and more generally about disasters that were somehow the result of human ingenuity, technology, and hubris. I don’t know how to pronounce his name either. 

I first read Langewiesche in a graduate school creative nonfiction workshop. The book was Sahara Unveiled. The bit that got me was when Langewiesche is stranded in the Sahara, and slowly interweaves his predicament with a methodical explanation of how people die in the desert. At what point do they start drinking their own urine? Etc. The prose is in the Hemingway vein, focused on concrete and physical particulars, withheld emotion, friction and complexity created by juxtaposition. We aren’t ever directly informed of Langewiesche’s feelings, but we still have feelings reading him. He invokes them rather than performs them. 

Langewiesche became one of those writers whose essays I’d stalk in the newstands, and a summer or so later, when his long articles about the post-9/11 cleanup of the World Trade Center appeared, I would greedily consume each installment as soon as it became available. That was one of those fortuitous intersections of modern journalism and my tastes at the time. I didn’t know I wanted to read thousands of words about how to clean up the destruction from that event, but once Langewiesche’s first article came out, I couldn’t envision anyone better for the task.

I still have those Atlantic issues somewhere in my files. Those essays, which eventually became the book American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center, were some of the key texts for me in those grad-school years after 9/11 — bits of nonfiction that were written almost immediately after the attacks and stuck with me. The others were “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s” by David Foster Wallace, which appeared in Rolling Stone, and a paragraph from Susan Sontag, which appeared in a round robin of regular writers in the New Yorker immediately after the attacks. Sontag notoriously wrote, “Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together.” 

She was vilified for this paragraph, and this game of mutual provocation, the endless pickle ball tournament of statement and mock outrage counterstatement, was my introduction to the world of American discourse. It’s been downhill ever since for mutual understanding and my mental health. I’d read Against Interpretation the year before and felt like a gigantic redneck, but not an uninterested redneck. That is, I didn’t feel stupid, like I did whenever I tried to read, for instance, Foucault or Derrida; I just felt uncultured, like I was living way out in the sticks. The next book of hers I read was On Photography, which I adored, and from which I quoted sloppily for the rest of grad school. I did not get invited to many parties. 

I admired Wallace’s writing so much that I now regard his influence as a kind of persistent infection, latent but always ready to strike if I don’t watch my diet. I still have his issue of the Atlantic, too.

Obviously these three writers are quite different. I can only imagine their awkward dinner conversation, or the MFA thesis defense where they all sit stiffly on the same couch. They would never hang out together. They would smirk at the mention of the others’ names. And yet they each presented viable modes, worthy models. Langewiesche was exemplary of a certain tradition. He presented a way to be a masculine writer that wasn’t chauvinistic or corny or deliberately retrograde. It feels weird talking about this in hyper-enlightened 2025, but these feelings existed then. One could argue that the Hemingway mode, both the prose and the attitude it embodied, moved from American short fiction into nonfiction reportage — the male figure caught in extremis, a kind of staged adventure. The masculine tendency to get oneself into physical scrapes, often involving the wilderness or complex machinery, or if one’s lucky both, moved almost entirely into the journalism-adjacent slick magazine-financed world in the 1990s and 2000s. In the 80s you had your Raymond Carvers, your Richard Fords. Then came your Tom Bissells, your Wells Towers. Your Hampton Sides and your John Jeremiah Sullivans. All these dudes had great names. This manly short story to slick magazine reportage crossover enabled not just some financial stability, but also an escape hatch from the self-awareness constraints that plagued ambitious contemporary American fiction. That is, everyone knew fiction was artificial, a barker tent full of scams and devices and tricks. It was clearly emotionally and intellectually manipulative. But that conceptual baggage did not exist for narrative nonfiction, at least not back then. Postscript: these dudes now just write for TV. Man’s gotta eat. 

All of which is to say that Langewiesche represented a distinct path, clearly allied with a tradition while not trapped inside its castle. He discovered new places, and drug them back to us with his sentences. I will miss them.