All Fours
...acerbically clever, radically compassionate ... July’s characteristic dry observational style can turn with equal ease to insouciant aphorism or to the lyrical eloquence with which she writes the extravagant, ungendering, transfiguring sex that takes the narrator to extremes of her own inwardness while forcing new kinds of contact and honesty, including with Harris ... By tangling explicitly with reality across mediums she pushes autofiction to new limits, revealing how good this genre is at questioning reality. How can the narrator make her own peculiarities part of a lived life? How can she get real in the face of death if what remains most real is art?
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[A] witty, probing romp of a novel ... Animated by July's winning voice and what-could-happen-that-would-be-weirder plot instinct ... Rife with unexpected seduction, inventive sex and sex-adjacent acts that are somehow racier. The frankness with which the narrator delves into perimenopause and menopause is a revelation. July's work has frequently been described as whimsical or twee, but those adjectives can't convey the molten core of this book, which is at once hilarious and dead serious.
Brims with vivaciousness. It’s a novel that imagines the end of fecundity as joyful. All Fours envisions perimenopause as a second flowering ... A deliciously bawdy, emotionally rich novel about the whirligig that results when the physical and emotional upheavals of middle life collide ... Profound and earthy.
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