-
4 out of 5
by
Anne
from
Columbus, OH | May 18, 2007
Note: If I could fashion a little half-star and put it in the rating, I would give this book at 3.5.
Miranda July: she's the lightning-rod hipster conversation of the year. I say her name at dinners and people rise from their chairs to damn or bless her. They pace and sweat and expound upon why she is the worst/best thing to happen to fiction in eons. They yell: "She's the next Lorrie Moore!" or "She's like those people who try to imitate Lorrie Moore and miss what's really good about her!" Sometimes they've actually read one of her stories or seen her movie, but sometimes they just resent her fame or adore her blog. In the bookstore, the yellow or pink jacketed hardcover book of short stories (yes, I said hardcover) beams from the bookshelf. It says, "I have no cover design. I need no cover design. And yes, my author photo went shopping at Anthropologie, then shunned all human contact (or staged this elaborate ruse)." I bought the yellow book. I was simultaneously suspicious and curious. And I STILL AM, despite having finished it. Here's the thing: Miranda July is an immensely talented writer. I want to make out with her imagination. Some of the stories ("Something That Needs Nothing," "Birthmark," "Mon Plaisir") in this collection are fabulously weird and lovely and offbeat -- and they take you to surprising emotional places. Others, however, feel a bit overwritten and unfinished. I admire her authority, but sometimes it comes across as vanity, and I get squirmy when I think an author relishes her own prose or ideas too much (takes one to know one). The things that leave me cold in July's work are the very things I worry about in my own, so this is a very personal critique. Lately, when magazines turn down my fiction, they praise my prose and voice and characters -- but they don't buy the endings or feel there is enough closure, etc., etc., so I want to know how she can fool them all and I can't? The truth is, I *loved* some of these stories. The last in the book -- "How to Tell Stories to Children" -- I would even give five stars to. But I feel let down by selections like "Making Love in 2003" and "The Boy from Lam Kien," which read like a bunch of "good line - no home" fragments pieced together. And stories like "The Shared Patio" and "The Swim Team" (the latter of which people go all kinds of crazy for) feel unsatisfyingly incomplete -- they set something up but don't go places with it. Nothing shifts. Saying this makes me feel conventional, but when I read, I want to feel *something* or be supremely aware of its absence. In these stories, July swears it's there, but it's not always. Also, I'm tiring of madwomen -- in her fiction, in my fiction, in everyone's fiction. OK, fine, I love them, but I also wonder what we're not dealing with or what kind of shortcut this is or if we think only nutjobs speak-think magical prose. "Ten True Things" and "Something That Needs Nothing" reminded me so much of my own stories (thematically and prose-ishly) that it was almost hard to read them. I felt like she was showing me everything that's glorious and horrible in my own work...everything was magnified. [Apologies to anyone who has read this far for all presumptuous, conceited, self-centered, self-analytical, self-serving comparisons above. I seek unprofessional help from anyone who wants to comment.:]
25 people found this review helpful
-
3 out of 5
by
Jeff
from
Carrollton, TX | Sep 6, 2007
I bought this book cause I was walking through a bookstore with a friend of mine... a friend I adore more than newborn puppies and tiny rabbits hopping in fields of grass, and she said, "MIRANDA JULY! I love her. She made the movie You, Me, and Everyone We Know."
I hadn't seen the movie, but I remember seeing an ad in the paper and thinking, "I want to see that movie."
And it was because of that, and because I adore this girl more than newborn puppies, and rabbits hopping in fields of grass, and moonlit nights, and sundrenched mornings, that I bought two copies of the book (one for her, and one for me. One could say "Jeff: Nice boy." One has said, "Jeff: Helpless romanitc sucker." I loath both definitions.
A book of short stories. Most are delicate. Like something you'd find in your grandmother's junk drawer. Not the one in her kitchen. The one that's the top drawer of her dresser. The one that's filled with pearl buttons, and half knitted doilies, and old black and white photos with a younger version of your grandmother, and complete strangers. You wonder who those people were? What kind of double life did your grandmother lead? Are these people still alive? Does she keep in contact with them? It's a whole world of possibility. You start to see your grandmother in a wholey different light. She's no longer this older woman who is constantly trying to feed or, or berating you for not wearing shoes or not having a job befitting of a college graduate. She's a real person now, with half knitted doilies, and pictures of random people. Old patches that look as if they were ripped off a G.I. uniform.
It would break your heart if you asked, and your Grandmother said, "Oh, look at that. You found that in my drawer? No, I have no idea what that is."
So you just let your imagination run wild.
Some stories fall flat. Like opening your grandmother's junk drawer and finding nail clippers. But at least they're sharp nail clippers... not the kind that break your nails when you try to use them. And sometimes, that's enough to get you through the day.
27 people found this review helpful
-
1 out of 5
by
Siobhan
from
Brooklyn, NY | Jul 18, 2007
I hate to say this, but I really did not enjoy the experience of reading past the first two stories or so. After a while I just couldn't figure out the appeal of a book that is packed cover to cover with disingenuous, childlike, wide-eyed, self-destructive women who are really just ciphers that things happen to... Okay, I take that back, of course that’s appealing to people, have I never watched porn or "Charmed"? But all the narrators would say things like, “After my boyfriend was incredibly mean to me, I lay there and decided to become a dog robot. My life will improve once I am a dog robot. I wonder whether they make steel bones for dog robots.” Funny the first time, because you know no one ever actually “decides” or “thinks” that and it's just an amusing function of the authorial voice, but incredibly grating the forty-seven-thousandth time because by then you realize you're on page 200 and no one in this book has “decided” or “thought” anything at all. And in that way, no one in the book is anything like a real person: Instead, the characters here are all a bundle of quirks and damages that we’re supposed to find adorable and funny. (The author photo, in which July seems to be trying to make herself look like a startled doll, maybe should have tipped me off...)
15 people found this review helpful
-
4 out of 5
by
Avishay
from
Lincoln, NE | Jun 18, 2007
Missed Connection
Author exorcises demons as characters search for love
by Avishay Artsy
Everybody gets lonely sometimes, and Miranda July crams as many forms of loneliness she can think of in her first collection of stories.
The inhabitants of July’s imagination reach out to strangers in hopes of genuine connection. Unable to find it, they often use sex to simulate closeness. A teacher seduces a 14-year-old boy in her special-needs class, and no one notices because “nobody really cares about anyone but themselves anyway.” An old man dreams of bedding a teenage girl, only to result in his first gay encounter with a co-worker. A woman climaxes while listening over the phone to her sister catalog her nightly sexual conquests. Two women at a romance seminar hold each other and weep passionately, then break apart, embarrassed.
July has been toying with the concept of disaffection for over a decade. Her early spoken word/music collages were released on the Kill Rock Stars label. In 2005, she starred in her breakout indie feature film “Me and You and Everyone We Know” as herself, a young performance artist eager to break into the art establishment. Likewise, her stories are narrated in the first person, an acknowledgement of the inseparability of her creations from herself.
July is among the finest of a growing pool of younger writers looking to chronicle the nation’s ennui. But her characters seem mostly oblivious to the problems outside their windows. The occasional references to popular culture, such as a television show where “couples compete at remodeling their kitchens,” are dismissive, treating the outside world as grotesque and senseless.
Despite the bleakness of their lonely lives, the adults in the stories respond to their surroundings with child-like puzzlement and wonder. One woman teaches the elderly inhabitants of her small town to swim by having them crawl across her apartment floor, their faces submerged in bowls of water. Another witnesses a neighbor having a seizure, and rather than rush for help, lays her head on his shoulder and takes a nap. Then, when she is awoken and sent to retrieve his medicine, a photograph of a whale on the refrigerator door sends her into a reverie. The woman, an amateur advice columnist, suggests depressed readers share their sorrows with a telephone operator or postman.
If there’s a shortcoming here, it’s that the empathy the reader feels for the characters soon gives way to annoyance at their remorseless narcissism. They all seem like thinly-veiled sketches of the author, wondering what it means to really love. It seems trendy to complain that, with so many new gadgets and digital landscapes designed to improve communication, no one knows how to speak to each other anymore. But July’s characters don’t just want to talk, they want to belong. And in their search for connection, they somehow manage to scratch out a place of their own.
No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories by Miranda July (Scribner: 2007), 205 pages.
13 people found this review helpful
-
4 out of 5
by
oriana
from
Brooklyn, NY | Jul 7, 2007
Everybody is talking about this chick. I'm interested to see if she deserves the hype.
***************************************************************
And she does! First let me mention: I had heard all this talk of her being the latest hipster literary darling, but when I went to the Strand for a proof copy (I hate hardcovers), all my old co-worker friends kinda shamed me, saying that she was favored mostly by the chick-lit set. Strange, and I definitely can't imagine her appealing to that sort.
In any case, this book was perplexingly good. The best adjective I can come up with for these stories is sharp. Not sharp like 'clever' or whatever, but sharp like sharp, like a knife or thorns or something that cuts you. The stories all hurt, really, which is why I say perplexingly good. I mean, it's hard to say you like something that leaves you feeling like you just got a hole punched in you. Everyone is just so lonely, so unloved, so despairing.
Anyway though, I did like it. A lot. 'Something That Needs Nothing' is the best story in the book, and it nearly made me howl. 'How to Read Stories to Children' is fantastic as well. So, very nice, Miranda. I don't know if I could handle being your friend, but I'll def read anything you write.
8 people found this review helpful