'Joke, joke, joke, joke, and then at the end you're devastated." The American author David Sedaris sums up Miranda July's short story Roy Spivey for a New Yorker fiction podcast, comparing her style to that of her contemporary, Lorrie Moore. All three writers know how to use humour and self-deprecation to deliver a blow. On finishing July's story, about a woman's bizarre encounter with a movie star on a flight, Sedaris feels like "a different person, so completely, mysteriously shaken up by it".
The Californian writer July, who is also an acclaimed director, actress and performance artist, provokes this kind of reaction. She eschews the middle ground, drawing impassioned reactions from fans and critics alike. The criticism is often gender specific, aimed at writers like Lena Dunham, mentioned in July’s acknowledgments, who see in their own issues and peculiarities fertile material for their fiction.
Who is to say how much of July's anticipated debut novel The First Bad Man is taken from the author's own experiences. We assume, as we're supposed to, that it's fiction. But as with her earlier writings, which include the Frank O'Connor Award-winning collection No One Belongs Here More Than You (2007), certain crossover elements – new motherhood, insights into LA life, therapy sessions – lend an enjoyable friction to the work, a sense that the author gets inside the head of her protagonist.
Voyeur from the fringes
And what an interesting head it is. When we first get to know her, Cheryl Glickman is an unstable, delusional woman in her early 40s, living in LA. Cheryl is grey-haired, pear-shaped, with a “potatoey” nose and eyes that disappear when she smiles. There’s an undertone to her voyeurism as she watches society from the fringes. Babies are of particular interest: “I checked to see if he and I had a special connection that was greater than his bond with his mother. We didn’t.”
Cheryl works as a manager in a company that sells self-defence fitness DVDs. We see little of this career, or other real world activities, as Cheryl spends most of her time flitting between fantasy lives, obsessive self-analysis and dealing with an absurd new flatmate arrangement.
Before her bosses’ daughter, an Amazonian 20-year-old, arrives to stay and refuses to leave, Cheryl’s home life has been governed by her severe neuroticism: “I had spent years training myself to be my own servant so that when a situation involving extreme wretchedness arose, I would be taken care of.” Her life is so structured it leaves her in a strait-jacket, but Cheryl feels safe within these confines, which give her ample time to spend in her fantasy worlds.
These creations are intensely graphic, both violent and sexual. They are somewhat deranged but eminently believable, as detailed and layered as matryoshka dolls. One fantasy is never enough. It leads to the next, and on and on down the rabbit hole.
There’s an illusory relationship with her piggish boss, Phillip, who uses Cheryl to further his own perversions; an imaginary child, the ubiquitous Kubelko Bondy, perfected over decades; a disconnect, often hilariously, from social etiquette; and at the centre of it all, pressing questions over gender identity and sexual preference that are afforded little exploration in reality. Reality itself is warped, with Cheryl attending chromotherapy sessions, or later, another type of counselling where her neglectful therapist, Ruth-Anne, makes her urinate in a container behind a screen.
It’s no wonder Cheryl has “globus hystericus”, the sensation of feeling a lump in one’s throat. A most unusual saviour comes in the form of Clee, a beautiful, belligerent young woman who takes to bullying Cheryl in her own home. The ludicrous situation is related with humour and pathos, from physical fights, to a sexual awakening, to a poignant interdependency that develops when the unexpected takes place.
The rate of quips in the book gives a stand-up feel to proceedings, and some laugh out loud moments – “Anyone who questions what satisfaction can be gained from a not-so-bright girlfriend half one’s age has never had one” – but July contains the humour by matching it with insights. She is inventive with her imagery – a hundred snails let loose around the apartment, a “persimmon-coloured blouse” – and particularly strong on the subject of new motherhood: “A real mother throws her heart over the fence and then climbs after it.”
In a recent interview in this paper, July rejected the tag of "quirky" for her writing. Yet in Cheryl she has created a memorably quirky protagonist, a character who uses David Bowie's Kooks as her theme tune for a therapy exercise. Cheryl's rollercoaster journey from kook to a more orthodox role at the end of the book makes for an engrossing read. Or as David Sedaris might put it: joke, joke, joke, joke, reality.
