Okay, fine, All Fours

And Rabbit, Run

I read Miranda July’s new novel All Fours recently while on vacation, and out of irritation and disappointment with the book (and what appeared to be a universally positive response to it), I posted my one-sentence review on Substack Notes: “I did not like All Fours.” As a result, I have a number of new subscribers. Welcome! I don’t really want to do literary takedowns in this space, especially of buzzy contemporary novels by women; there are plenty of other places to read those. So I won’t make a habit of this! But I do want to elaborate on my reaction, and draw some connections to other things I’ve written about here.

Here are the broad strokes of the plot of All Fours: the narrator, a woman in a companionable but not especially sensual marriage, receives some grant money and decides to go on a cross-country road trip from Los Angeles, where she lives, to New York City. Only thirty minutes out of town, in the LA suburbs, she encounters a handsome younger working-class man, who flirts with her. She’s infatuated, and instead of going on the road trip, the narrator hires the young man’s wife to renovate a motel room into a beautiful love nest. The narrator and her new lover hole up together, sharing an intense sexually-charged intimacy but never actually have sex (he wants to remain faithful to his wife). After returning home from her “road trip” she finds some statistics about how women’s libidos drop after menopause, and her FOMO is intense: what if this is her last chance to experience truly mind-blowing sex? Eventually she comes clean with her husband and asks for what amounts to an open relationship, which after some negotiation, he grants her. The motel room becomes her private escape from her family life. She doesn’t actually reunite with her motel-room crush, but pursues a series of sexual experiences with women, as well as some decidedly un-kinky role play with her husband. Aside from discovering that even when you’re polyamorous it still hurts to get dumped, everything works out okay in the end.

Part of my disappointment with All Fours comes from the fact that none of this is exactly unexplored territory. Novels abound with protagonists both male and female in not-wrong but not-quite-right marriages, finding themselves unraveling and blowing up their lives when offered a taste of true passion. Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary are the canonical examples, but I found myself thinking instead of a different novel: John Updike’s 1960 bestseller Rabbit, Run, which I wrote about in this newsletter last spring.

The two novels have some striking parallels. Rabbit, Run also famously begins with an aborted road trip: the unhappily married Rabbit (actually named Harry Angstrom) goes out to pick up his son and, realizing he doesn’t want to, decides to drive south as far as he can and never come back. He doesn’t make it far: he gets lost within hours and has to return, but instead of going back to his marital home he moves in with a lower-class woman and former sex worker, Ruth, whom he meets in a diner. Then he spends the rest of the novel floating around town, fucking Ruth, having conversations about the meaning of life, wondering if he really has to conform with his expected role and take on manly responsibilities, eventually returning to his wife briefly before leaving again. Despite what seems like a clear lineage from Updike’s book to this one, I haven’t seen any other writers draw comparisons to All Fours, probably because no one actually wants to read Rabbit, Run anymore.

In my piece last year I wrote: “men can’t really get away with writing books like this anymore, at least not without heavy criticism.” And they can’t, for good reason! Rabbit, Run itself wears its misogyny proudly. As I noted, that doesn’t mean women aren’t taking a turn at this kind of book. Back then, I drew a parallel with works of millennial fiction featuring alienated young women:

Still, the themes persist, including in the novels I described above, about the young women working underpaid publishing jobs and having unpleasant sex with indifferent men. The bones of these novels are much the same: faced with unsatisfying jobs and disappointing partners, the protagonist — out of rage or boredom or the feeling that there must be something better — blows up her life.

All Fours isn’t really like these other more recent books — in its optimistic attitude, its conviction that it’s exploring exciting new possibilities for nonconformity, it’s much more like Rabbit, Run. But what’s actually striking about it is how few risks it takes, how little it is willing to stake. Most of the characters, apart from the narrator, are understanding, accommodating, and even cuddly. The narrator and her young man part amicably and his wife never finds out, or if she does, there’s no sign anywhere of her pain. Her friends are skeptical but generally on board with her project, and none seriously criticize her or cut ties. Their child is totally unfazed. Her husband is irked and wounded at first but gets on board with the open relationship and dutifully gets a girlfriend of his own. Not only that, the girlfriend is totally non-threatening: not the hot young pop princess the narrator felt uneasy about, but someone friendly and age-appropriate, with good boundaries. And her own girlfriend treats her well. The one note of weird hostility, an encounter with the young man’s mother (who seems creepily involved in her son’s sex life) is a thread that’s dropped almost as soon as it’s picked up. Rabbit is undoubtedly an asshole, and does some truly loathsome things, while the narrator of All Fours never even has to contend with being seriously disliked. And, more than critiques of the self-absorption of the narrator, this is the novel’s moral failing: because she never causes anyone devastating pain or suffers other serious consequences, the weight of her choice is diminished: she doesn’t even risk being disliked by her readers.

Part of what’s puzzling about the protagonist of All Fours is her seeming deliberate unsophistication. As a commenter on the Notes thread pointed out, she’s an artist in LA in her 40’s — surely this isn’t the first time she’s encountered the idea of non-monogamy? Or worried about her youth slipping away? Or experienced an erotic desire that it would be problematic to pursue? These feelings can feel overwhelming at age twenty-five — the age of Harry Angstrom in Rabbit, Run — but in middle age, many people have had at least one go-around with an existential crisis.

One thing I definitely don’t want to to is moralize about marriage, monogamy, family, the emptiness of sensual pursuits, etc. etc. In fact, when another writer used All Fours as the pretext for some finger-wagging at women, lecturing that we’re all going to die and there are more important things than sex and fun, I promptly unsubscribed. I do think that people can and should have the space to discover what kind of life best suits them, and the freedom to ethically pursue it. One could argue that what’s actually surprising and transgressive about All Fours is that it suggests the possibility of having it all: maybe you can have both freedom and a family without anyone having to throw themselves under a train or drown a baby or even lose a friend. And maybe even menopause isn’t so bad after all! But — why write a novel if that’s all you’ve got, if you aren’t willing to get into the mud? It might be enough for a personal essay, but in a novel, it’s not enough for me.