All Fours, Pretentious Thoughts on the Value of an Easily-Digestible Novel with Difficult Content: a book review

I’m late to the party as usual. I am always this way with fashionable pop culture reads, due to my being a pretentious bitch. (This will come up a lot in this review.) I’m not degrading myself, it’s facts. So I just, in this twelfth month of 2025, year of madness, read All Fours by Miranda July.

I read her first novel, The First Bad Man, a couple years ago and didn’t like it. But then kept hearing positive things - like, really positive things - about All Fours. I thought to myself, hmmm further proof that I won’t like it: everyone likes it. I also got a lot of feedback that it paralleled things in my own life, which piqued my interest, but still not enough to pick it up. Then Sara (my creative partner here at Saltmine) read it over Thanksgiving break and loved it, and this immediately bumped it onto my list. We first bonded through similar taste in novels, and I’ll read anything she suggests. There are approximately three people in my life I trust in this regard. (All three of them are women.)

July articulates phenomena and their corresponding feelings extremely well. But it’s not because she’s a great writer (though she’s very good). It’s because she’s an insightful creative with a brilliant mind. I should qualify here that I’ve been reading a string of translated works from Asia and South America of late - authors who harken from countries that instinctively leak poetry throughout their prose, that don’t tie things up neatly, or provide satiating endings, or even offer much of a plotline at times. I’ve been swimming through these dreamy seas. So an American author writing directly about things I know well and personally may have been a bit of a culture shock. It almost felt garish at first.

Initially, I felt there was something luxurious missing from the reading process when it came to All Fours. I didn’t want to eat her words (which was jarring after the foreign authors bend I’ve been on) - though they were wildly, sometimes shockingly, articulate. I just wanted to know what she had to say. But desperately, because she actually got it and figured out how to put it down explicitly. That’s valuable writing, delicious or not. Especially when articulating femaleness within a particular culture. Here are a few examples:

This from page 171:

‘For a moment I longed to be a woman with that kind of concern and a normal, everyday feeling in her chest. Nothing exciting happening but really nothing wrong. I used to have days like that. Did I? Maybe not.’

Or this from page 203:

‘Brave was the word Harris always used to describe my stoicism during Sam’s birth. Bearing the unbearable. But it wasn’t only bravery, it was also submission. This is happening and my only option is to accept it. I cannot fight it. I can only move through it.’

Or THIS from page 244…woof:

‘“Fantasies are all good and well up to a certain age. Then you have to have lived experiences or you’ll go batty. Which is the normal thing: dementia, memory loss, Alzheimer’s–all more common in women. Fantasy consumes them until they can’t tell what from what.”

“Aren’t those things genetic?” I said weakly.

“Exactly. It’s passed down through the generations.” [...] “You think those cotton candy dreams aren’t hurting anyone” - she handed me a shot - “But they are. You and everyone around you. Cheers.”’

Or, finally, this from page 255:

‘I’d forgotten to feel guilty walking through the front door; now I waited for guilt but it didn’t come. This particular sex had been a matter of life or death, not a romance but a ladder thrown to me.’

It is obvious that July has moved through these realities, these feelings, and she successfully found a way to communicate them. In a really digestible, accessible way. This is also where I got hung up - the accessibility, the lack of tummy troubles. Considering the author, I expected it to be less accessible, and though it was much better (by leaps and bounds) than other books like it (Liars by Sarah Manguso, Crush by Ada Calhoun) it contained the same disappointing plot nuances i.e. tidiness that has no place in a story involving a troubled marriage and feminine upheaval.

I discussed this with Sara. Her take: ‘There again I think it’s editing. Cause it could’ve easily been a 600 page book. But that’s not a best seller length.’ She’s right; it feels highly edited. That’s where the unwarranted tidiness comes from. But that got me thinking in an entirely new light. Yes, it could’ve been edited down to this neat little version so that it would sell. But MAYBE - just maybe - they (July, her editor, the people that make publishing decisions) parsed it down to serve up some cutting truths to the wider market. Women who would not pick up a non-linear, upsetting 700 page book would certainly pick up this one. And they did! It was a best-seller in 2024. There’s value in that.

The silver lining of the everything-in-its-place disappointment is that you don’t have to be a pretentious bitch to digest it. And maybe that’s really fucking genius. To muse on important, current themes involving marriage, feminism, and freedom in a way that someone who frequents the best seller lists can confront without contracting actual vertigo halfway through and abandoning the book. I’d like to believe this is what she was doing. Also, it’s totally possible she did it for sellability. Which is also fine. We all have to eat.

The real truth and beauty comes out in the second half of the book, when our main character processes the unexpected events that occur in the first half. The thoughtful aftermath is even more entertaining than the sexy action. And then the ending comes around very neatly into a full circle of everyone’s-okay-now and no-one-hates-each-other. This is a little ick. It tastes a bit rotten if you chew on it for more than four seconds. But it also works, because the rest of the book is more eerily tidy than it should be, as I already touched on - these untidy things happening within a tidy framework. What should be long and messy is not. It feels wrong but it’s consistent. And it also fucking worked. Just not exactly in the way I hoped it would. So who am I to poo poo it? Riches for the masses on the literary scale? Yes yes yes. Always yes.

Do I recommend? Yes. To pretty much everyone. Is it as good as it could / should be - or honestly, probably was pre-edit? Nope. But I’m not that mad about it. It is a valuable, stand-alone read. (But I hope the next one’s messier.)

by Brooke Hamilton