The First Bad Man

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On the plus side, I laughed a lot while listening to the audio. Miranda July reads her own novel in a perfect tone, with a practical straightforward voice that makes Cheryl come across the way she probably does in the world of the novel - a boring almost middle-aged woman on the outside and CRAZY on the inside. We are treated to an almost constant internal dialogue, of magical babies with the presence of Kubelko Bondy, of sexual fantasies that are anything but enticing, of the tolerance of horrible people that seem to surround her - inept therapists with imaginary specialties, bosses that are a flavor of "enlightened" plus an incredible variety of selfish that seemed actually pretty familiar to me, a man trying to get her approval to have sex with a Glamorous Wartime Singer: Red was based off of these. In one of her later shorts she does sing a song with a wartime theme. These developments are described in deliberately grotesque, even repellent terms, as though Ms. July — whose films (one of which featured a talking cat) have drawn criticism for being whimsical and twee — wanted to counter accusations of preciousness by being as gross as possible. Many of these passages simply come across as gratuitous and contrived: a therapist who keeps her urine in Chinese takeout boxes instead of bothering to use the bathroom; Clee’s feet described as reeking of “pungent foot fungus, which hit two seconds after she passed by”; and 100 mail-delivered snails crawling all over Cheryl’s house.

Red kept a consistent appearance in her shorts, but she was slightly shorter in her initial appearance. Obnoxious In-Laws: "The House of Tomorrow" had a Running Gag about features "for the mother-in-law" that were clearly intended to show she's not welcome. I glanced around the waiting area. “Who will water this plant?” I leaned over and pushed my finger into the fern’s soil. It was wet.Phillip, the board member, seems to be returning her affections, but really he is just warming her up to confess that he has fallen in love with an underaged girl but that he hasn’t yet consummated the relationship and he won’t -- unless Cheryl gives the okay. As he waits for her to decide if it’s okay, he sends her status updates on the sexual side of things: The girl has been rubbed through the jeans. She’s held his stiff member. That sort of thing.

Miranda July has created in her stories and here in her amazing debut novel something close to a new literary genre. If science fiction speculates on new technologies in human life, July imagines new emotions that have never been described. Anger is erotic. Pleasure feels like fear. Sex dynamites everything around it. And yet we can’t stop having it. Not since David Foster Wallace has a writer so hilariously captured the wince-worthy adventures of the awkward human beings we all pretend we aren’t.” For 25 years, Cheryl has been a manager at Open Palm, a women’s self-defense studio turned “self-defense as exercise” video purveyor; her careful systems are deranged when her passive-­aggressive bosses force Cheryl to take on their 20-year-old daughter, Clee, as a house­guest. Clee is “so much a woman,” Cheryl tells us when they meet, “that for a moment I wasn’t sure what I was.” Clee is sexy, with “a blond, tan largeness of scale” as well as eye-watering foot stench. She is, it turns out, a terrible guest. Her manners are egregious, she’s a layabout boor and she calls herself a misogynist. Cheryl’s meekness and sad appearance incense Clee to the point that she begins to beat Cheryl up. P.S. I can't believe George Saunders blurbed this novel. Eggers, yes, because a byline is a byline. Homes, yes, because her book ( May We All Be Forgiven) is turning out to be just as creepy. But Saunders? Dude.Open Mouth, Insert Foot: One of the literal gags in "Symphony in Slang," as the hipster explains that "every time [he] opened [his] mouth, [he] put [his] foot in it." Lame Pun Reaction: In "The Car of Tomorrow", the narrator groans at a pun about a car with "seal-beam headlights", with barking, live seals coming out of them. From the acclaimed filmmaker, artist, and bestselling author of No One Belongs Here More Than You, a spectacular debut novel that is so heartbreaking, so dirty, so tender, so funny--so Miranda July--readers will be blown away. Lovely writing is interspersed with outer-space levels of strange…yet gradually this catalog of the grotesque builds into something beautiful, and this deeply odd book abruptly becomes transcendent. It feels like being on a plane when it takes off—all that rattling, speed, and oil, and then suddenly: airborne.” At her speaking engagement at the Modern Times Bookstore in San Francisco's Mission District on May 16, 2007, July mentioned that she is currently working on a new film.