All Fours

This is not a review, but this is what I found myself thinking about.

When I was in college I read all of Michael Pollan’s food books . It was good reading, I learned how to braise from him, and I can really braise, but after a while I noticed that he was always seeming to be learning for the first time how to cook. “Michael Pollan explores the previously uncharted territory of his own kitchen.” Forgive me, is this not his fourth book about food?

At a dinner party, a friend described The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as a coming-of-age story. I was like “Isn’t Arthur Dent middle-aged?” and they said something like “I think we never stop coming of age.” I don’t think that they intended this effect, or even understood that it was happening, but I was left speechless with horror. I really don’t want to keep coming of age forever. I would like to do something else.

This is kind of how I felt about All Fours. I know, I know, I’m getting mixed up about memoir and fiction and whatever, what’s endorsed and what’s a story. I hate it when my readers (on the very small scale that I have them) do this to me, and they do it to me because I’m not good enough at writing fiction to stop them. But I’ll do July the honor of assuming her craft and control are good enough that this is part of her intended effect. When I read this novel about a middle-aged sexual awakening, so unlike anything else the narrator experienced that she ends up doing things she never expected, it’s really hard not to remember her previous work about a character (noticeably similar to the author) whose sexuality leads them to do things they never expected.

I’m being unfair. I’m making the mistake the love interest makes: “My work was full of unlikely couplings, unauthorized sex, surrealism, and a shit ton of lesbianism. Apparently he had taken all of this quite literally. I tried to imagine myself from his point of view, a married mother somehow living completely off the rails.” But this character cops to the peep show past, etc etc.

I liked reading the book. It was an actual story. It was well-written and funny and symmetrical and left me unsettled. It’s currently the accepted thing to say that unsettling writing is good, or that good writing is unsettling. It isn’t utopian, it doesn’t for instance oversimplify Harris into a controlling husband; when the protagonist makes “high-protein, date-sweetened treats” at home and secretly pigs out on junk food with her friend, she doesn’t imply that it’s Harris’ judgment that makes her do this. The characters feel whole and not self-flattering. It has an integrity in this sense which is very valuable and which for instance Leslie Jamison’s Splinters lacks—it didn’t leave me feeling like I had read a story at all. In a sense, it’s none of my business, but you know, she did write it.

But something didactic is going on. If it’s not that the book is didactic, I guess the protagonist is? The protagonist telling everyone “This too could be yours.” The “this” is maybe best summed up here:

“Change how?[…]That would defeat the whole point,” I said. “I’d have nothing to look forward to! Nothing to prepare for.”

The future itself was another lover, reaching backwards in time to cup my balls. Instead of dangling in the present I was held, I was safe; I was gently squeezed and aroused by my never-ending preparations.

So obviously there’s irony and humor there, and the protagonist seems to recognize that it’s a little silly, internally contradictory. But the character is still acting this out, and it feels sort of endorsed, and it also makes me feel like I felt hearing my friend saying we never stop coming of age. I just feel like this story embodies fundamentally different ideas about change and stability from mine—not just whether change is more or less valuable than stability, but what change and stability even are. “Perpetually at the crucial turning point,” but never turning.

There is a kind of a crisis where the protagonist seems to be repulsed by herself in the way that leads to change: “I had entirely misunderstood the assignment, the scale of what life asked of us. […] Having seen myself, I could no longer be myself.” But what does she do almost immediately afterwards? “What, you having a strangely intimate interaction with a stranger? How can this be?” I think this scene of sudden emotional intimacy is supposed to feel hopeful, and in a different book it would, but here it feels pretty depressing. It just brings us right back to the beginning of the book, where the protagonist’s husband is already at the point of “exhaustion” with the protagonist for this pattern. The symmetry is pleasing, but it doesn’t make me predict good things or even interesting things to come for the protagonist.

It made me think of a memory, which, if I were being dishonest, I could turn into a story of me being changed by an unexpected encounter with a stranger, but which in actual fact only added weight to the scale on the side of one of my preexisting ideas about life: when I was much younger, I went to a fancy bar alone, where I was approached by a much older, multiply divorced intellectual. He told me a lot of anecdotes about his life, the interesting people he’d met, more famous and interesting than anyone I had met, and he told the anecdotes charmingly. But the charm was a little too practiced. By the time he was telling me the story about Hemingway’s daughter, the only thing I could think about was how many times he must have delivered this patter to other young women. His pitch to me was novelty, but I realized that neither by sleeping with him nor even by rejecting him would I be doing anything new. I probably was not even the first woman to have this realization while listening to these stories.

The stuff with the narrator’s kid is the most interesting, possibly just because I’m baby crazy, but also because this is the only relationship in the book that really seems to have both novelty and stakes—both exist because she isn’t going to leave.

Maybe obviously, the book is not as simplistic as I’m making it sound in this. It’s fun, and also pleasingly-structured, and not overly simplistic or utopian. But this is what I thought about when I put it down!