All Fours
By Miranda July
Riverhead Books, 326 pages, $29
Don’t Be A Stranger
By Susan Minot
Knopf, 320, $28
Two novels of the moment—the film director and screenwriter Miranda July’s sparkly and funny All Fours; and the moody and emotional Don’t Be A Stranger, by Susan Minot—present middle-aged women sexually obsessed with unavailable younger men. The setup isn’t a punchline, and the stories aren’t particularly about age—it’s probably a triumph of feminism that we’ve moved past all that. Instead, both books are an icy plunge into an intense kind of sexuality that feels relevant in the modern era, and is expressive of modern dysfunction.
Neither novel quite works, however, and July’s especially goes down a rabbit hole that would only seem sympathetic to a Los Angeles celebrity. This is because each poses a question familiar to adulterers and sexually obsessed people everywhere—what does the experience mean?—but is unable to compellingly answer it. (An older male writer friend quipped, “When men wrote those books, we didn’t have to ask what it meant.”) There is an answer though, lurching into view in the advanced stages of the sexual revolution, which maybe it takes two menopausal sex novels by two talented female writers to bring out. In both cases the stories become a slog, but the author’s illusions are illuminating.
“The couple’s love does feel like a portal to a different dimension.”
All Fours is an affair story for our day’s morality. A zany, bisexual, married-filmmaker-artiste protagonist, who is “a bit of a public figure” (much like Miranda July), departs Los Angeles and her dull husband and transgender child, embarking on a soul-searching cross-country drive to the Big Apple and back. She sends all her New York friends naked selfies to let them know she’s coming (“it’s just part of keeping in touch these days”). But instead, she stops in Monrovia, a charmless suburbia next door, and takes up for the next three weeks (the trip’s putative duration) with the gorgeous young man who wipes her windshield at the gas station. July’s voice is delightful, and she is great at subverting expectations and doubling down on weirdness, as the inherent ridiculous humor of the road trip ending in Monrovia, the last place you’d go for romance, suggests. She also writes about sex with an innocent graphic candor made available to many of us via sexting, that makes the private public and feels fresh and new.