How to Make Sex Boring: All Fours and How to Sleep at Night

 

All Fours (2024)

By Miranda July

Riverhead Books, 326 pages.

★

 

How to Sleep at Night (2025)

By Elizabeth Harris

William Morrow Books, 290 pages.

★★

 

Did I get your attention with the headline? Good. Be sure to tread lightly around these  two books. 

 

 

 

All Fours has gotten a lot of attention for being transgressive and bold. It is both of those things, but too bad few have asked if it has anything to say. Not really.

 

An unnamed multi-media artist who conducts interviews with women about sex gets caught in her own anthropological web. After many years of libertine hook-ups–more with women than men–she married Harris, a music producer, and, they have a  “they” child, Sam, because mom doesn’t want to force Sam into any category. (One wonders, though, about her insistence upon having baths with Sam.) The crisis point is that she is now 45 and fears she’s on the downward curve of being attractive or libidinous. She has just gotten an unexpected royalty check from a whiskey company, though it was something she wrote about hand jobs. She plans to drive from Los Angeles to New York and perhaps interview a pop star. This surprises Harris who says there are “Parkers” and “Drivers” and she is definitely a Parker who might not be up to a cross country journey.

 

Turns out he’s right (on several levels). She gets no further than Monrovia, California, checks into a motel and stays there for nearly a month, all the while pretending to be driving to or being in the Big Apple. At a petrol stop she meets Davey and falls in lust with him, though he’s much younger. Luckily his wife Claire is a designer whom she pays scads of money to transform her shabby motel room into a luxury suite. It will be the site of her frantic bouts of masturbation. She fantasizes sex every which way and manages to lure Davey to her suite. No intercourse occurs, but there is a degrading lap dance and a cringe-worthy insertion of her tampon. Davey seems more fixated on becoming a dancer. Nonetheless, she develops a deep fixation on Davey that takes a toll on her marriage. Harris agrees to live in an open relationship, she meets Davey’s mother and a friend who was once Davey’s sexual partner and coach. A perimenopause diagnosis exacerbates her midlife crisis and I reckon we are supposed to applaud her return to her premarital lesbianism.

 

This polarizing book has been reviewed by some a “funny,” and by me as pathetic. If you want a middle position, numerous reviewers took Miranda July to task for trying too hard to be offbeat and outrageous. I can live with that, but I can’t live with the novel’s illogical scenarios or soporific writing. 

 

 

 

How to Sleep at Night has more depth, though its four central characters would be boring were not three gay and the fourth conflicted. Ethan, a junior high history teacher, and Ethan, a lawyer, have been married for nine years and are parents to young Chloe. Ethan’s sister Kate is a lesbian and a well-known TV journalist in New York City who has lost her mojo and joie de vivre. Nicole is married to Austin, has recently moved from Atlanta to New Jersey,  and is playing the roles of upper middle class housewife and mother to Sarah. In college, she dated Kate. Think they’ll get together?

 

Ethan is the problem figure. He wants to run for Congress as the “future” of the Republican Party; Gabe is to the left of Bernie Sanders. There are some amusing James Carville/Mary Matalin moments, but if you’ve been paying attention to politics, you know that Ethan's “makeover” to suit party bigwigs will be fraught and that both Gabe and Ethan will be driven to a breaking point.

 

Author Elizabeth Harris is a far better writer than Miranda July, as one might hope of a New York Times reporter, yet as noted, the major thing that distinguishes the dilemmas of her central characters from run of the mill malaise is that each is gay, lesbian, or bisexual. (To be fair, Harris does has an intriguing subplot on journalistic ethics.) Harris, has a wife and child, which I mention solely because there is a lot of passionate lesbian sex in her novel, but Ethan and Gabe are confined to pecks on the lips and hugs. For me, the characters lacked maturity. It’s as if they are recent graduates rather than adults in their late 30s. 

 

Rob Weir