All Fours

Miranda July's second novel was one of 2024's most talked-about books, and the critical consensus puts it among the year's best fiction. Reviewers consistently praise July's singular voice — wry, precise comic timing married to genuine emotional exposure — and credit the book with doing something rarely attempted in literary fiction: treating a middle-aged woman's interior life, and the physical and erotic realities of perimenopause, as urgent, funny, and worthy of a full-scale novel rather than a footnote. Many critics reached for landmark language, calling it the first great novel of its subject, and it earned a National Book Award shortlist spot alongside a sweep of year-end best-book honors.

The book's approach is part absurd comedy, part tender excavation. Its premise is famously simple — a semifamous artist sets out on a cross-country road trip and almost immediately stops, checking into a motel and reinventing her life in place — and critics delight in how July stretches that small radius into a full portrait of a woman rebuilding desire, domesticity, and identity from scratch. The candor about sex and the body is the book's signature, praised by most reviewers as brave and liberating even when uncomfortable.

That candor is also where the divide lies. General readers have been far cooler than critics — its community ratings sit well below what one expects from a book this decorated — and the recurring complaints cluster predictably: some find the sexual explicitness excessive, others find the protagonist's self-absorption trying or stretches of the book repetitive and meandering, and a fair number simply didn't find July's deadpan eccentricity funny. The disagreements are about voice and appetite, not ambition — almost nobody disputes that the book is doing something new; the split is over whether that something is a thrill or an ordeal.