Review

An artist in her forties, married with a seven year old child, decides to drive across country to New York and back. Half an hour into her journey, she checks into a motel and secretly spends the rest of her holiday in and around the motel room, which she engages a local decorator to lavishly redecorate in the style of posh Parisian hotel Le Bristol, a job that costs $20,000. She also embarks on an intensely erotic encounter with a younger man.

Returning to her normal life, she is unsettled, and her life changes.

*

Well, this was a very interesting book. I was hooked from the first pages. It is pretty odd in a number of ways, and the characters, while strange, are both authentic seeming and unpredictable. The whole time, I was wondering where it was going. The writing is very good and in many ways relatable, and a number of threads, such as the room decoration, pleasingly tie together towards the end. It’s quality. It’s very frank about intimacy and sex, and probably not for the squeamish. Without wanting to give too much away, it’s mostly about being a woman, perimenopause, and true, unlimited freedom in a still patriarchal world.

This will not appeal to all readers – the content is sometimes a bit icky – but I found it engaging, and it is undoubtedly very high quality writing.

334 pp. First person autofictional narrative. Definitely for adults only.

Some quotes:

• “‘But I have a traditional side, too,’ I said. ‘Must I be entirely that to marry? Do we ask this of men? No, that would be humiliating for them since they get their sense of self from their work and from the power and majesty with which they walk through this world as a self-owning creature. Same.'”
• “The sudden absence of responsibility was a floaty, frothy, almost hallucinogenic weightlessness. No one to make breakfast for, no need to pack a five-part bento box lunch, no need to yell Put on your shoes! Brush your teeth!”
• “There did not have to be an answer to the question why; everything important started out mysterious and this mystery was like a great sea you had to cross.”

> Click here for content info – spoilers, enter at own risk

Sex scenes and sexual content; plenty of profanity; infidelity; marital tension; unconventional marriage; traumatic childbirth flashbacks, with baby in intensive care; intimate scene involving a tampon; depression; repeated mentions of relatives who died by suicide.

*

July, M. (2024). All fours. Canongate Books.

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I read this novel via Libby — support your local library!