All Fours

She packed the car for a coast-to-coast drive, the kind that reshapes a person somewhere around Nebraska. She got thirty minutes down the road. Then she checked into a motel and did not leave and the trip became something the map never accounted for.

What it's about

A semi-famous artist, married, a mother, tells everyone she is driving from Los Angeles to New York. Instead she stops at a nondescript motel barely outside town and stays put, renovating the room, renovating herself, letting a short detour swallow the whole itinerary. What she is running toward is harder to name than what she is running from: desire, reinvention, the sense that midlife might be a door rather than a wall.

Miranda July keeps the premise deliberately small and domestic, which is the point. The distance covered is nearly nothing. The distance traveled is enormous. She writes about the body, aging, marriage and longing with a frankness that is by turns funny, mortifying and tender, often within the same paragraph.

Why everyone's talking about it

This is the book people argued about at dinner for the better part of a year and the arguments were the appeal. July has spent a career (as a filmmaker, artist and the author of "The First Bad Man") making work that splits rooms cleanly down the middle and "All Fours" turned that instinct on midlife female desire, a subject the culture usually files under "quiet" and hopes stays there.

If you have ever felt the ground shift in your forties and wanted a book that treats that shift as an adventure instead of a crisis, this one hits somewhere specific. Readers who love an unreliable, oversharing narrator, who want candor about perimenopause and marriage and want, will feel seen in a way that is almost uncomfortable.

It is also, fair warning, a lot. The narrator makes choices that will exasperate some readers and the sexual candor is not decorative. If you want a tidy story with likable people behaving well, this is not that. Skip it if you need your protagonists to earn your approval.

The verdict, for now

Read it if you are drawn to the messy, honest, slightly unhinged interior of a life in transition and you do not need the narrator to be your friend. Wait if you would rather not spend three hundred pages inside a stranger's midlife reckoning, however sharply observed. Either way, do not start it expecting to reach New York.

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