The First Bad Man
Miranda July
[Canongate]
Miranda July makes odd art. Miranda July’s odd art – films, short stories, visual and performance pieces – inspires strong reactions: July is twee, overly whimsical, and ‘strenuously quirky’, or July is a prodigious chronicler of contemporary life, in all its meta-level cutesy curiosity. July’s debut novel, The First Bad Man, is not quite whimsical, but it is strained. The story centres on Cheryl, a reclusive middle-aged woman who builds for herself a snug, insular world of dowdy corduroy and rigorous order. This scrawny life is crudely interrupted by the carnal, profane Clee and the aging, seedy Philip, part of the book’s universe of weird, lonely characters kept apart by their own flinty psychobabbling focus on self. These figures grab at connections with one another through violent roleplays, ‘immensely satisfying adult games’ and, eventually, unconventional maps of parenthood and family.
July knows her way around language, and at its best her prose stings with recognition and uncomfortable allure. What initially seems a forced collection of willfully eccentric personality tics is sometimes elevated to a moving – if disturbing – virtual reality, drawn through carnivalesque power reversals and grotesque conventions. Yet finally, the book’s frenzied collage of fantasy and self-analysis leaves the reader frazzled, longing for the refuge of an on-beat sentence and a simple emotional truth. Instead, we are given something stranger and rougher that almost works.
Words: Gill Moore
