You, Me, and Everyone We Know was one of the first truly weird things I ever experienced. I don’t remember when exactly I saw it, but I was 15 or 16. I probably ordered it to be delivered to our house from Netflix’s DVD subscription, and I probably heard about it on one of the music message boards I spent all day reading at the time. I was just developing taste, and I was trying to see/hear/read as much as I could.
It’s been 20 years since then, and I can’t really say anything definitive about what is in the movie or what I was reacting to--it might not even be that weird in retrospect--but I do remember it was the first movie that blew open the concept of what a movie could be. That it didn’t have to be linear or expository ordeal with trenchant, historical themes. It could be weird and just make you feel weird for 90 minutes in a way you never had before.
July’s novel isn’t about me, though. It does feature a 30 something fan of the protagonist who first engaged with her work in his teens, but that’s more of a means to an end. The novel is interested in that 20 year gap though, the gap between being a young artist and young woman with a world of possibilities open to you and being a 45 year old artist, settled, and on the brink of menopause.
There’s a lot that this novel does well. Jenessa Abrams’ review in LARB nicely pulls at trauma plotline to illustrate its centrality in the novel despite and because of its marginality in the narration of the novel. And the novel is, by all accounts, researched well, with July thanking friends, family, and healthcare professionals in the acknowledgments section of the novel, all of whom contributed to its sprawling consideration of aging and gender and sexuality and artistry from a perspective that is not often given space in awards-nominated fiction.
The question I kept struggling with as I read the novel was: why a novel? Or, why this kind of novel? July is well-respected in all sorts of artistic mediums, and the most novelly parts of this novel were both the most important portions and the most stagnant, devoid of all of the energy that first infected me as a 16 year old watching You, Me, and Everyone We Know.
All Fours is divided into roughly two portions (although there’s four “parts”): her “trip” across the country and her return and subsequent life. The former portion is magnetic in the way it pushes readers head-first into uncomfortable, awkward immediacy of life changing emotions, impulses, and realizations. This section features July choosing to drive across the US in an attempt to become a “driver” and not a “parker,” in her husband’s terms. She only makes it a couple hours out of LA before stopping in a town with (or because of) a charming, muscular 30 year old dancer she’d like to get to know better. The two embark on a unique, uncomfortable, and never-consummated affair while the protagonist pretends to still be taking a cross country trip.
In these scenes, the narrator faces her divergent desires--love for her husband and her family stability vs the adolescent fire for this Hertz Rental Car employee--head on, acknowledges the uncomfortable and discomfiting nature of those desires, and describes them in excruciating detail anyways. In these scenes, access to the narrator’s interiority is crucial, as any kind of mediating force would censor or translate such embarrassment to something more acceptable, more suited to social expectations.
It was stunning to me, then, that the return home sees the narration turn into a kind of postwar, literary realist novel. The questions of the first section about age and sexuality and social expectation and interpersonal promises are all still there, but instead of discomfit, the dominant affect of this section is maybe pensive. As the narrator is removed from the object of her desire, we are removed from the immediacy of that desire and instead begin to occupy something like a seminar room where the narrator is our professor trying to tie the threads together for us.
As the novel moves towards something much more recognizable, the kind of inquiry of social structures that Rabbit Angstrom would lodge, the question of the novel’s form came to the front of mind. There are, of course, major differences between the protagonist of All Fours and Rabbit Angstrom, and the novel shouldn’t be penalized for using available genres. But the first half is so desperate, so immediate, so weird. What happened? It’s not like the narrator gets less honest or awkward in the second half--after having sex with an older woman she slips into manic thoughts about the ability of sex to break walls down & wonders if she should sleep with her parents--but the distance the narrator slips into as she solicits input from friends, family, therapists, doctors, other artists, etc. begins to feel more like a Coetzean campus novel than whatever the first half was.
But shouldn’t authors get to use well-established, literary form to represent the challenges and opportunities of post-menopausal living? I’m happy the novel has successfully reached a wide audience and is broaching important topics and, I assume, is selling well. I’ve seen 3 people in my small, South Dakotan town reading it. But I guess I’m just wondering, when your skill is in representing the utterly strange, the so honest as to make the reader squirm, the immediate and undeniably embarrassing deepest impulses, what the most maligned form of the novel can do for you?
