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.