All Fours: the menopause is neither fun nor sexy

 

 

I wouldn’t mention this novel except that it seems to have become some kind of reference object, the novel about the menopause (although by no means the first). It was reviewed in the TLS, and then mentioned in the Guardian, in a piece about erotic fiction. As if that wasn’t enough, just after I had written this post, Zoe Williams, also the author of the erotic fiction article, in her regular Guardian column gave the novel a big write-up and asked, “Can menopause be fun and sexy? Yes, says Miranda July” [Guardian, 13 August 2024).

Reader, I warn you, this book is not erotic. It’s not fun, and it’s only sexy in the sense that it contains a lot of sex: most of it masturbation, if you find that sexy (and more about that later). Until I read Miranda July, I never realised how entertaining the world of Charles Bukowski was. There is no humour here.

The hero is a 45-year-old woman, a mother with a non-gendered child, Sam, aged seven, and a partner, the patient and long-suffering Harris. She starts a long drive to New York, but encounters a younger man, who works for Hertz Car Rental, and whom she fancies. However, her desire is not consummated, despite her frantic attempts, although she does manage to go to bed with one of his former partners. Panic-stricken because she believes the female libido drops off a cliff at the menopause, she agrees with her husband to have an open relationship, and has encounters with women. Some time later, she watches her non-boyfriend dance and has a kind of mystical experience. That’s it.

Most of the focus of the novel is about the concerns and anxieties of middle-aged American women, what the narrator describes as the perimenopause, and it doesn’t make for pleasant reading. FOMO is one of the anxieties: specifically, the fear that she might not want to have sex any more. The narrator pads out her self-absorption with regular exchanges with other women, finding out how they behave, and hence determining how she should behave (the author states in an afterword that the novel was partly based on a number of interviews with women).

So obsessed is the focus on the emotional state of the narrator that several aspects of the novel seem sketchy or inadequate:

• She requires a space where she can have her meetings with Davey, the would-be lover, and has a motel room refurbished at a cost of $20,000, with the work done by Davey’s partner, without (at least in the beginning) Davey’s knowledge. Her work seems to be occasional, but very well paid. There are no money concerns in the novel.
• I thought an open relationship was when you had sex with people other than your long-term partner, but for the most part, there is no sex with her partner. When the narrator achieves a sexual relationship with another woman, she behaves appallingly when her partner breaks it off.
• For the most part, the narrator behaves abysmally, taking everyone around her for granted, including her partner and child, and repeatedly texting her would-be lover in a way that would be considered stalking.
• The ending is a damp squib. Instead of consummating her desire, the narrator watches him dance in public, suggesting that the Hertz Rental assistant is really a consummate, world-class dancer; her dream man is a prince after all. In other words, this brutally realist novel, so blunt about the real-life problems of a middle-aged woman, drifts off into a vague fantasy at the end.
• Highly questionable is the hero’s attitude to stardom. She is some kind of artist, and later author, with an agent. Throughout the book, strangers approach her because of her reputation. The narrator expects special treatment as a result of her status – when she attends a performance by Davey as an invited guest, she is disappointed there is no designated area for her, but she has to sit in the audience.
• The narrator treats her child as a child-minder would: despite repeated protestations of love, the parent shows little interest in what the child does. The child is just an irritant and an interruption in the way of the narrator’s obsessions. For example, the narrator is on the phone to a friend:-           

“I have some questions about menopause and libido”.

“Where is my Lego book?” Sam screamed outside the garage door.

“Under the couch! Sorry, Mary.”  

You could not say the sex is sketchy. There is a lot of it, in a lot of detail. But sex, for the narrator, is not an equal activity. Sex is not about pleasure, it’s about winning and losing. As for the masturbation, there is a lot of it through the book, and it seems to have cast a spell over reviewers (and Zoe Williams), as if the idea that a woman might refer to masturbating as somehow liberating, rather than pleasurable. Yet the narrator doesn’t seem to masturbate for pleasure – she even admits to something I find difficult to imagine, angry masturbation (“I masturbated angrily to the thought of Harris fucking Caro”).

In short, I found the narrator an unpleasant character to be alongside. I found her neuroses tiresome, her obsession with herself very self-indulgent and unhealthy. Making the menopause the subject of your novel does not make it great. A serious theme is not invalidated by creating an enjoyable and entertaining work, and this is neither. The narrator would benefit from thinking about something (or someone) other than herself.