The First Bad Man, by Miranda July
Miranda July is an artist, particularly working with the mediums of film and performance art. I read a review of one of her films in Lorrie Moore's See What Can Be Done, so I was expecting oddity. But I don't think I was expecting quite the degree of sexually graphic oddity on display in The First Bad Man.
Cheryl is a forty-something woman who lives alone and runs a company that sells fitness trainings based on self-defense. She is a profoundly bizarre person, but I suppose we all are if we dig deep enough, and we do dig very deeply into Cheryl. She's obsessed with Phillip, an older man on the board of directors with whom she feels an existential connection. Her attempts to seduce him are clumsy, clunky, and awkward. In the midst of Cheryl's fascination with Phillip, the 20-something daughter of the company's founder comes to live with her. Clee was not invited, yet here she is, invading Cheryl's one-bedroom home, a sanctuary she has very particular rules about, upending her life entirely. Clee is brash, smelly, and drop dead gorgeous. Their hostile relationship develops a physical component, one that is clearly sexual without involving any actual sex, and Cheryl's masturbatory imagination goes into overdrive. Then Clee gets pregnant, and our narrative switches abruptly to one of profound motherly longing and love.
I'll admit it was a bit uncomfortable reading parts of the book. Anything involving sex was discussed in a profoundly unsexy manner, and as Cheryl's sexual fantasies descend into deviance, reading becomes work, and one has to question whether what you're getting out of it is worth the effort. For me, I think that answer has to be no. Cheryl's search for romantic love apparently dies upon the sudden welling of motherly love, and since the last portion is so clearly about motherly love, all the weird stuff that came before it seem unnecessary. The graphic masturbation sessions lend nothing to the ending message, and I think the book would have been sufficiently weird enough without them . I doubt this is a book worth reading unless one is already a fan of Miranda July's other work.
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Cheryl is a forty-something woman who lives alone and runs a company that sells fitness trainings based on self-defense. She is a profoundly bizarre person, but I suppose we all are if we dig deep enough, and we do dig very deeply into Cheryl. She's obsessed with Phillip, an older man on the board of directors with whom she feels an existential connection. Her attempts to seduce him are clumsy, clunky, and awkward. In the midst of Cheryl's fascination with Phillip, the 20-something daughter of the company's founder comes to live with her. Clee was not invited, yet here she is, invading Cheryl's one-bedroom home, a sanctuary she has very particular rules about, upending her life entirely. Clee is brash, smelly, and drop dead gorgeous. Their hostile relationship develops a physical component, one that is clearly sexual without involving any actual sex, and Cheryl's masturbatory imagination goes into overdrive. Then Clee gets pregnant, and our narrative switches abruptly to one of profound motherly longing and love.
I'll admit it was a bit uncomfortable reading parts of the book. Anything involving sex was discussed in a profoundly unsexy manner, and as Cheryl's sexual fantasies descend into deviance, reading becomes work, and one has to question whether what you're getting out of it is worth the effort. For me, I think that answer has to be no. Cheryl's search for romantic love apparently dies upon the sudden welling of motherly love, and since the last portion is so clearly about motherly love, all the weird stuff that came before it seem unnecessary. The graphic masturbation sessions lend nothing to the ending message, and I think the book would have been sufficiently weird enough without them . I doubt this is a book worth reading unless one is already a fan of Miranda July's other work.
Shop indie!
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