All Fours

My special lady friend suggested that I read Miranda July's wildly popular new novel.  I didn't know anything about July as an artist, filmmaker, or writer, so I assumed at the outset that I was reading a piece of fiction.  Slowly, however, it became obvious that there was a strong element of autobiography to the story.  Obviously, we wouldn't want to confuse our (not so) humble narrator and main character with July herself, but the similarities between the story of a woman's sexual awakening/midlife crisis and July's own life are clear. Normally, I'm not terribly interested in highly autobiographical fiction.  Of course, it's all a matter of degree, since every author unavoidably puts much of themselves in every work in one way or another.  But generally I've found that the closer we come to autobiography, the less interesting the fiction becomes, perhaps simply because people are too close to their own life to really have much useful or broad or wise perspective on it.  Without a deliberate thrust towards universalization on the part of the author, it seems to me that the story often ends up lacking enough imaginative power to fully draw us in.

I think July mostly avoids this trap.  In part this is due to the fact that the story is pretty inventive and unpredictable, and the writing funny and philosophical enough to keep us entertained.   But the larger reason the narrative partially transcends autobiography is because it focuses in an almost sociological way on an experience that more than half of the population will at some point relate to -- menopause.  Now, on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog, but loyal readers are doubtless aware that my personal reflections on menopause should be taken with a grain of salt.  Still, it seems to me that the novel is an interesting and honest exploration of what the experience might be like.  And July not only tells her own story, but to some extent tries to weave in the experiences of other women with all the girl-group discussions she details.  

There's a limit to this however, and in the end this limit points to the biggest problem I had with the book.  People who write highly autobiographical fiction tend to take their own life way too seriously, and these people are kinda unpleasant to be around or read about because they're basically just narcissists.  In reading the novel, I couldn't help feeling my compassion for the main character run out time and again for the simple reason that, despite going through menopause, she still doesn't seem to be able to grow up.  She remains incapable of considering the impact her actions are going to have on those around here.  Fundamentally she seems rather neurotic, childish, and self-absorbed.  The novel is all about her 'exploring her desires', in principle a brave and admirable thing, if done in a responsible and adult fashion, rather than as one long train wreck.  In fact, seen from a distance, the relatively happy moral it leads us to is that you can have everything you desire in life ... if only you stop worrying about how much damage your frantic grasping at it has on you and everyone around you.  Which strikes me as whatever the exact inverse of wisdom is. 

This assessment of what was really an enjoyable and interesting book is clearly too harsh.  There are all sorts of ways to work ourselves back towards compassion for the main character, not to mention the distinction between this character and the author. The birth of her child was a major medical and emotional trauma.  We have a tough culture in which to be a successful and sexually independent woman.  And maybe we should look upon menopause itself as a form of trauma.  These all sound like pretty tough things to cope with.  When I criticize something these days, I frequently realize upon further examination that I'm really just saying I wasn't the target audience.  Which in the case of this novel is a pretty obvious observation.  

At the same time, I think it's worth doing a simple thought experiment.  Imagine that All Fours was written by a middle aged man freaked out by the fact that he has a hard time getting it up anymore.  In wrestling with how catastrophic this existential midlife crisis feels, our hypothetical 'hero' goes on a bender with a much younger woman that ends up destroying his marriage.  I submit to you that many such autobiographical novels have in fact been written, and that we wouldn't consider this sort of story new, interesting, bestselling, or anything except the same deplorable one that the "Great Male Narcissists" (as DFW called them) have told so many times.  Of course, something changes when we switch the genders and mix up the sexual orientations.  And we shouldn't ignore the fact that certain people have historically been unfairly locked out of casting themselves as the 'hero' of this story.  But we also shouldn't necessarily think we are reading a fundamentally different, and somehow magically more admirable story.  Something doesn't change when we retell this story.  Indeed, how big a stretch is it between Miranda July's unnamed main character and Ben Turnbull?

Maybe the only thing the reader ends up appreciating about Ben Turnbull is that he's such a broad caricature of an Updike protagonist that he helps us figure out what's been so unpleasant and frustrating about this gifted author's recent characters. It's not that Turnbull is stupid - he can quote Kierkegaard and Pascal on angst and allude to the deaths of Schubert and Mozart and distinguish between a sinistrorse and a dextrorse Polygonum vine, etc. It's that he persists in the bizarre adolescent idea that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants is a cure for ontological despair. And so, it appears, does Mr. Updike — he makes it plain that he views the narrator's impotence as catastrophic, as the ultimate symbol of death itself, and he clearly wants us to mourn it as much as Turnbull does. I'm not especially offended by this attitude; I mostly just don't get it. Erect or flaccid, Ben Turnbull's unhappiness is obvious right from the book's first page. But it never once occurs to him that the reason he's so unhappy is that he's an asshole.