Suspended Animation

Miranda July reminds us that the weirdest parts of life are also often the most familiar. Throughout her work, the attentive magnification of granular detail yields the kind of hyper-specific revelation that feels both appealingly unmoored and quietly profound. It seems right, then, that July’s latest, All Fours, should embrace that hoariest of genres: the novel of midlife crisis. Little artistic territory is more bourgeois, more laden with cliché, and—as July illustrates—more ripe with surreal possibility.