PL34 - Don't get any big ideas

On all fours

Margaret Thatcher said any man riding a bus was a failure and until recently I kept a literary analogue: any book being read on public transport was trash. In the months Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow was popular I did no reading, because I had to keep my Kindle on Act 5 Scene 5 of Macbeth, ready to flourish the original into the lap of any normie reader who might dare take the seat beside me. But a recent event unsteadied my zeal.

I was on my way back from Belfast. So delayed had been my flight and shuttle bus, and so delayed now was my coach, that I had almost exhausted the long gap I had left between my scheduled landing and my restorative appointment at the sauna. You won’t doubt this as the scene for my axiom’s shattering: if any prospect will see a fellow unearth cobbles and cry, ‘revolution!’, it is the denial of his trip to Hackney Wick Community Sauna and Cold Plunge (£15 a visit).

Here’s what happened. The young woman behind me in the queue asked cheerfully if I’d watch her stuff, then headed off. Cheerfully. It seemed impossible that anyone could be in a good mood. The other queuers were astonished too, and we all brooded in silent awe on her buoyancy. Then off the top of her ill-piled handbag tumbled a book. We all thought: the key! To happiness! Unfortunately for the others, only I had been anointed custodian of her possessions, so only I got to check the cover.

All Fours by Miranda July. I had long known it as a Tube book; now I knew it as my next book…

A middle-aged woman says goodbye to her husband and child and sets off on her two-week drive across America. Half an hour later she pulls into a roadside motel. She stays over. Then she cannot bring herself to leave. Then she spends $20,000 decorating her room. Then she really cannot bring herself to leave. Then from her room she sees a young man dancing on his own. Then she really really cannot bring herself to leave. It begins like this:

Sorry to trouble you was how the note began, which is such a great opener. Please, trouble me! Trouble me! I’ve been waiting my whole life to be troubled by a note like this.

She’d like to be “chill, grounded”, but this is how she dances:

There was a small group of people dancing in the living room. I moved discreetly at first, getting my bearings, then the beat took hold and I let my vision blur. I fucked the air. All my limbs were in motion, making shapes that felt brand-new. … The people around me were nodding and smiling; I couldn’t tell if they were embarrassed for me or actually impressed. … I moved deeper into the crowd, shut my eyes, and slid side to side, shoulder first, like I was protecting stolen loot. Now I added a fist like a brawler, punching. I made figure eights with my ass at what felt like an incredible speed while holding my hands straight up in the air like I’d just made a goal. When I eventually opened my eyes I saw Harris across the room, watching. I could tell from his face that he thought I was being “unnecessarily provocative.”

As she says later, “What a lark!” In Peep Show Jez says wine is “nice, but not actually nice like hot chocolate.” This book is actually fun. She is nosy, conceited, embarrassed, and hilarious. There are frequently moments like “Forty-five minutes later I was still walking. I no longer wanted to fuck everyone in the world—that was lunacy, ha ha!—now I wanted to eat the world like a giant fruit.”

The note is signed ‘Brian (from next door)’. But they “all immediately knew which neighbor Brian was. The FBI neighbor. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from Brian it’s that being in the FBI is not a secret like the CIA. He wears his (bulletproof?) FBI vest with the letters FBI on it way more than could possibly be required.” So her husband scoffs and dismisses the note. She tries to persuade him it’s dramatic and worth pursuing, but he gets distracted and doesn’t hear her asking if she shouldn’t call him. It’s very funny. But then their child asks “Call who?”, and the narrator stands “holding the note with that funny little abandoned feeling one gets a million times a day in a domestic setting. I could have cried, but why?”

Her husband does not join her mad schemes. Not really any of her life does. Each day she works at her desk in the garage “perpetually at a crucial turning point; everything is forever about to be revealed.” When she comes back in she has to “consciously dial myself down” like “Buzz Aldrin preparing to unload the dishwasher immediately after returning from the moon.” I suppose comparing it to spaceflight means she knows it’s a bit absurd, but still when her husband implies it’s an external hobby she is “suddenly overwhelmed with the urge to slap him, hard”, because she feels that astronaut is the real her.

She behaves as herself only once a week, when she meets her best friend to binge junk food. They eat ice cream with artificial rainbow sprinkles. It’s part of “a larger agreement to never become rigid, to maintain fluidity in diet and all things.” Always, the premise is that “we had changed radically since the last meeting, and would again and again… we never could be sure what was coming.”

These modest, weekly doses of self-expression have for a long time kept her life in a fraught but livable balance. Once a week has for a long time sufficed for self-expression. But her fortnight of dance and beauty in the motel is an overdose: she is “raw and extravagant, erotic and wholly consumed by a ceremony of my own invention”, and cannot become unconsumed.

The days in that room, always sunset, were “the most beautiful time” of her life, and the dancing boy says it was of his, too. But he asks her not to contact him. He wants to get on with real life, with his fiance. He was happy in the room, but wants to be “happy in a normal way that I can, like, build a life on.” The narrator knows what he means. “Before even opening my eyes, it was obvious that I had experienced too much joy in the Excelsior. Regular life–my actual life–was completely gray, a colorless, never-ending expanse.” Every night she feels “how truly forsaken I was, having lost my bond to my actual family and formed an alliance with someone who might as well be fictional.” Sleeping pills allow her “not to have to contend with myself.” She has “entirely misunderstood the assignment, the scale of what life asked of us. I’d only been living second to second… until the next shared dream, emergency, premiere. … I’d whipped myself into a froth of longing—or worked, created fictions. Fuck.”

It’s really hard to know how to treat your self. Heroic individualist society keeps us well alert to the dangers of neglecting it, and if you are a few years into working life some of your friends will have had their selves wither for spending too much time on things that did not matter to them. But might there be a danger of overwatering your self, too? Near the end of university one of my friends walked around asking people what they thought they were going to do, then whatever it was, say consultant, answer “Okay, well it’s good to do something and hard to know what you want. But I’ll just say I think it would be a shame if all you did with your life was be a consultant. I think you’re bigger than that.” To me that seemed not far from going round sticking needles into people’s arms and injecting them with heroin.

All Fours’s narrator has fantasised of “the vast and total winning” when she’d “finally reveal what I’d been making… and be suddenly seen, understood, and adored.” Her friends, her family and the world would realise “You have all missed the point of me.” These fantasies “really took the edge off life, carried me through the endless cleaning and cooking and caring and working.” She calls her dad, and asks why her mum and aunt killed themselves:

“You always said they killed themselves out of vanity. What does that mean exactly?”...
“They lived in a fantasy! They both thought someone would come sweep them off their feet and when it finally hit them that this was just a dream–”
“Wait–why was it just a dream?”

She comes to see why. For her it has to do with hitting life’s midpoint. You are still for a moment, which means you have stopped rising, which means you are about to start falling. “Falling might take just as long, but it was nothing like rising. The whole time you were rising you could not imagine what came next in your particular, unique journey; you could not see around the corner. Whereas falling ended the same way for everyone.” Everyone realises this. “Going forward, things would not work out, disappointment would reign. My grandmother knew this, and her daughter. Everyone older knew. It was a devastating secret we kept from young people. We didn’t want to ruin their fun and also it was embarrassing; they couldn’t imagine a reality this bad so we let them think our lives were just like theirs, only older.”

So much watering herself, so much dreaming, has left her alone. You cannot have the dreamy furniture, she observes at one point, and a marriage. Babies exist only in the present, never in your dreams of the future. She feels she has “not been of enough service in my life.” A woman tells her “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.” She agrees, “Right. It was better to have something real than–” “Nothing?” the woman interrupts. The narrator remembers all the “triangulations I had orchestrated, forever trying to avoid both entrapment and abandonment.” But you “couldn’t have both.” Dreaming, expressing your “raw and extravagant” self can leave you with nothing, alone.

At the book's emotional climax she meets a figure in whom she invested much of her dreams. She wanted to meet her in the decorated room but it is taken. Instead they meet in the stark one next door and face reality, dreamless. All they say is “I can’t believe this happened,” and they say it over and over again. “There was some fundamental incredulity that we were closing in on and it was terrifying. ‘I can’t believe this happened,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe this happened,’ I said.”

You certainly laugh with her, throughout the book. And you also laugh at her. But you never laugh at her about the dream stuff. One friend admires her: “brave to feel so much. … I guess because it could… end in pain.” The narrator is an extreme case of the journeying, exploratory soul, but none of us are without dreams, and “any calling, no matter what it is, is a kind of unresolvable ache.” Knowledge of their irreality does not stop our dreams. We are like the dancing boy:

“Some movements he did again and again, like a repetitive thought or a human trapped in the limits of this fucking life.”

Some people seem to have gone too far one way, other people seem to have gone too far the other way, and I’m sure anyone else on earth could tell me where I stand within ten seconds of looking at me. But what would we do if we knew? The book’s accomplishment, which is the accomplishment of a lot of art, is destroying both plausible certainties and leaving us unsure. “Nobody knows what’s going on. We are thrown across our lives by winds that started blowing millions of years ago. …This standstill between us was just life, that was suddenly obvious. There was no way to fix it, nothing to open-source; life was just a struggle.”

At the book’s close she goes to see the dancing boy on the stage. He has made it and draws crowds. Remember his dancing is of “a human trapped in the limits of this fucking life.” It leaves the narrator crying. But the lights come up. And “the person next to me was also wet-faced.” And “it wasn’t just us. I looked out at the circle of faces and saw that every single audience member was going through some version of my revelation, some reckoning with the self.” Maybe this book offers the assurance that you’re not alone in not crying at being alone. Not everything, but maybe something. Or maybe just another spasm of self-expression, dooming us to yet greater solitude.

GM

Afterbirth

There is Sarah Churchwell discussing Gatsby for it’s hundredth anniversary at the Cambridge Literary Festival on the 26th of April.

There is a live recording of the My Martin Amis podcast, which has had a lot of high-profile journalists on it, in Soho on the 23rd of March.

I’m going to enter this prize which publishes you in the Observer if you win, thought you might like to enter too. You need to send in 800 words, reviewing something that came out since 1 Jan 2024, by the end of this month. Seems like a good rung. See you on the podium. Here’s the link.