For years I’ve been perturbed by a certain segment of BookTok and other literary-based social media which is preoccupied with so-called “red flag” books. These are usually novels like Infinite Jest or Catcher in the Rye. Any man who proclaims a red flag book as his favorite is to be avoided, apparently. While I take the point that many a young man has taken the wrong lessons from a work of fiction, I tend to think that these books can be and often are admired for their artistic merit.
But if I have in the past pooh-poohed the concept of a red flag novel, All Fours by Miranda July may have changed my mind.
The protagonist of All Fours is a forty-five year old woman, some kind of performance artist of middling renown. She is married and has a seven-year-old child. In advance of a planned trip to New York, she impulsively decides to drive cross-country rather than fly. Her only apparent motivation for this decision is that her husband expresses doubt that she could do such a thing.
Setting out, her resolve quickly collapses, and instead embarks on a string of completely absurd and unbelievable behaviors. Stopping just 45 minutes from home in Monrovia, CA, she sees a handsome young man at a gas station and decides to stick around town for a while. She then checks into a motel and, unimpressed with her surroundings, spends $20,000 redecorating with the help of an interior decorator, who just happens to be her gas-station-guy’s bride.
From that point, our protagonist spends the entirety of her planned trip bumming around her hotel room, scheming to seduce the gas station guy, lying to her husband about everything, and somehow justifying all of it to herself.
July is, of course, deliberately being provocative. She knows that her main character is being ridiculously obnoxious and self-serving to the extreme. What I guess I don’t understand is why I should care that it’s a deliberate choice. What satisfaction is to be derived in reading about the world’s worst person treating many other people like shit and blaming the whole thing on society’s treatment of middle-aged women, even as she herself is rich, successful, and married to a man who, by her own account, treats her well, loves her, and actively participates in housework and childcare?
I don’t know, I just didn’t find it funny at all. And to see it get so much acclaim is honestly a little worrisome. Are people relating to this character? What terrifying concept.