Middle Management

A 40-something woman undergoes asexual awakening in Miranda July’s thrilling new work.

- CHRISTINE SMALLWOOD

"YOUNG PEOPLE ESPECIALLY had trouble making distinctions between ages over 40,” thinks the unnamed narrator of Miranda July’s new novel, the gutsy, funny, wise, chaotic, dirty, panic-inducing All Fours. When she can bring herself to look at women a couple of decades deeper into the muck, something worse than uncertainty gets stirred up—it’s outright loathing. “Sometimes my hatred of older women almost knocked me over, it came on so abruptly,” she admits. “These ‘free spirits’ who thought they could just invent the value of things.”

In a good romantic comedy, hate is only the prelude to love.