The main character of Miranda July’s novel All Fours is a very woke 45-year-old woman who refers to her own 7-year-old son as “they.” Who could imagine that I’d enjoy reading about her circle of gender-non-conforming, fluid, drug-addled, “experimenting soul” fru-fru ladies who don’t need to work for a living and who perish of boredom in their $2-million LA mansions?
But I did because All Fours explores the subject of a middle-aged female sexual transformation that nobody else wants to talk about. I tried to discuss it here on the blog a couple of years ago but younger female readers got sore over the possibility that there might be something they hadn’t learned about sex by age 16, and I had to quit the discussion before people received unbearable psychic wounds.
The protagonist of July’s novel stops at a motel on a drive from LA to NYC, and all of a sudden it happens. It’s an instantaneous transformation. All of a sudden, she understands the entire history of art that always seemed unnecessarily filled with naked bodies. She understands men in a way she never did before. But it’s too late to do anything about it. When she finally receives the full force of human sexuality, her fertility is gone, beauty is gone, and the capacity to refashion her life in any meaningful way is also gone. The realization that this gift is given to her exactly when it’s of no use strikes July’s character with how exquisitely cruel and unfair the laws of biology are. She has spent her whole life trying to make a mockery of biology. She is even planning to trans her small son. But nature comes back with the inevitability of a hired assassin and hits her with a wave of regret over her entire life before and after this moment.
July’s character is a frivolous, spoilt brat of a woman. She is also one of those eternally immature women who try to use symbiotic relationships to make up for their stunted growth. As a result, she responds to this great crisis in the most bizarre and entertaining ways imaginable.
None of us here are rich, coddled princesses who can sit in our butts all day and prattle about our hormone levels with our equally stunted girlfriends. But we do need to remember that what happened to this character is likely (but not guaranteed because we aren’t factory produced) to happen to us. In the absence of wealth and unlimited leisure, we need a life strategy that takes into the account that in middle age the hereto divergent paths of male and female sexuality suddenly reverse course and approach each other like never before. If people are not prepared, it messes with their heads. I mean, even if they are very prepared, it still messes with their heads but at least knowing about this is a good idea.
The female sexual crisis of middle age has been described in literature a lot but it’s usually done obliquely. The female character in its grip is portrayed as suddenly developing a desire to be an artist or realizing that her husband is uncaring. July’s big achievement is that she speaks of it bluntly and almost clinically, and nobody can pretend they don’t understand what she’s on about.
I can’t recommend this novel to everybody because the many pornographic parts soon become tedious and the protagonist’s intellectual limitations lose their entertainment potential about halfway into the book. The subject, however, is important, and we can see how many women are grateful it’s been raised in the number of positive reviews of the novel.
Clarissa's Blog 